


Mad Max, In Control

by trippingatthedazeinn



Series: Control [1]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Abusive Neil Hargrove, Child Abuse, Depression, F/M, Gen, Good Babysitter Steve Harrington, Good Significant Other Lucas Sinclair, Hawkins (Stranger Things), Mild Language, Physical Abuse, Protective Steve Harrington, Running Away
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-07
Updated: 2020-04-23
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:33:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 56,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23525437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trippingatthedazeinn/pseuds/trippingatthedazeinn
Summary: After Billy’s death and the Byers’ move, things have gone to a new, more subdued, normal.  The exception is for Max, who never realized how violent her stepfather was until he no longer had Billy to unleash it upon.
Relationships: Dustin Henderson & Maxine "Max" Mayfield, Maxine "Max" Mayfield & Mike Wheeler, Maxine "Max" Mayfield & The Party, Maxine "Max" Mayfield/Lucas Sinclair, Steve Harrington & Maxine "Max" Mayfield
Series: Control [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1715692
Comments: 120
Kudos: 160





	1. Better Plan

**Author's Note:**

> This story is definitely Lumax but it also is in general about Max's relationships with the other characters including Mike and Steve (Max's friendship with Mike has not been developed enough in my opinion!).

**November 3, 1985**

A group of four people felt very small. Despite the Party having consisted of only four (local) members for nearly a month now, Max wasn’t sure if she was ever going to get used to it. It was weird that before she and Eleven had crashed the party–she was acutely aware she had “crashed” it much more than Eleven had–a couple years ago the boys were accustomed to having just three friends. Max herself had never had a large number of friends, but it wasn’t about the number; she missed Eleven and Will, and nobody could replace the hole their leaving had left.

Still, things were okay when it came to her friends. They were in high school now, which wasn’t as scary as they had expected. Every day, Max met Lucas, Dustin, and Mike outside of Hawkins High School, and every day they convened for lunch. After school, Max was usually able to avoid going home by tagging along to Lucas’s or going with all her friends to Mike’s basement. They didn’t play D&D very much anymore, but Max was okay with that; she had never really been that into it. Instead, they had made a habit of going to the video store where Steve worked to rent movies and watching them on the old TV in Mike’s basement. It wasn’t as much fun as going to the movie theater, but that had died with Starcourt. Anyway, it was cheaper, and Max had approximately no money.

Max was incredibly grateful to typically have somewhere to be, someone to be with. On an ideal day, she’d leave for school in the morning and not return home until as late at night as she could. Sure, her mom made dinner, but Max had grown good at weaseling her way out of it, claiming the demands of high school required her to do homework every night at around 6:30pm. Max was always good at making a plan and executing it. Her plans nowadays always came back to that one thing: do NOT go home.

_Never, ever, go home, until you absolutely have to._

On this particular Sunday, November 3, Max had spent the entire day with the Party. They had met at the arcade in the morning and eventually ended up playing Monopoly at the Wheelers’. When dinnertime arrived, Max, Lucas, and Dustin said goodbye to Mike and headed out.

Max hoped to go to Lucas’s for dinner, though she didn’t feel right asking. She had stayed for dinner at his house too much lately, and she hated to impose on his family. Still, she prayed he would invite her. He was, after all, still as eager to spend time with her as ever.

But as the three of them neared Lucas’s house, Lucas and Dustin biking while Max skated beside them, Lucas waved and pedaled into his driveway without pausing. Max felt her breath hitch in her throat a little, but she forced it out. She wasn’t going to be a baby about this. She couldn’t blow her problem out of proportion; one night at home wasn’t going to kill her. She would be fine.

Dustin was oblivious to Max’s instantly increased anxiety level, jabbering on about the randomest things as they progressed down the road. Max heard herself laughing, but it was distant from the thoughts swarming her mind.

“See you tomorrow,” Dustin was saying as he turned off towards his house. Max’s was a bit further, but she was getting close. She called out bye to Dustin and continued to glide down the street. She loved the rush she got from skateboarding, even if it was to her doom. God, she needed to not be so damn dramatic, seriously.

Neil was home. Of course he was home. It was six o’clock on a Sunday. But his car parked in front of the house never failed to heighten her anxiety, not since July. Before July, she hated Neil, but he was just an object of her hatred, a villain. Now, he was a scary villain. Not that Max would let herself be scared of someone she hated as much as Neil. Sometimes, though, she just couldn’t help it.

“You’re late.” Max was barely into the house before she was greeted with Neil’s heavy, flat voice calling from the table. “Your mother made dinner twenty minutes ago, and we have been waiting. That’s extremely disrespectful to your mother’s hard work.”

Max walked slowly through the house to the kitchen, choosing not to respond. She sat down at her spot across from Neil, refusing to look at him. Her mom sat silently, a wan look on her face. “Thank you for making dinner, Mom,” Max chanced. She was annoyed at her mother and didn’t even want to thank her, but she would rather do that than speak to Neil. Susan smiled limply, no actual words escaping her lips.

Neil cleared his throat and reached out his hands to say their normal prayer. Someone as evil as Neil pretending to have Christian values was laughable to Max, and she hated saying the prayers while holding hands with him and her mother. She did it anyway.

When the prayer was over, they began eating. Neil filled the awkwardness with political tirades that only he seemed to listen to, Max focusing only on her pasta. She was an expert at this, really. Sit quietly, say nothing, and get away when she could. She missed Billy acutely. Despite all of the fighting, despite the horrible dynamic of their family, he had somehow completed the picture. He was just another person that was gone when she wanted them to be there. If only she could be having a sleepover with El right now.

The disturbance that Max had been working so hard to avoid didn’t come until after dinner, when Max’s mother broke Rule #1 in Max’s mental list of things not to do: mention Billy.

Max was washing the dishes, something she rarely did but had been told to do by Neil and wasn’t going to argue about. Susan remained at the table, paging through the newspaper like she was barely digesting it. She must have noticed the date, because she looked up and said shyly, “It’s November 3, we’re almost at four months since…you know…”

Max nodded, still not opening her mouth. Her friends would probably be shocked to learn how little she spoke in her own house, considering with them she was constantly talking. Max could sense Neil listening from the living room, and she wasn’t going to give him ammunition. She was going to finish the dishes and go to her room and not leave again all night.

“Max, would you want to go take flowers to Billy after school tomorrow?” Susan persisted. “I can’t go and Neil’s working, but it seems right, don’t you think?’

It did sort of seem right, though Max’s feelings about Billy were very conflicted. She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to say. “Supposed to” being the operative words. This wasn’t about her choice, this was about the right thing to say at that precise moment.

“I have to work on a project after school,” Max decided to say. Neil was weird about Billy, too. If she agreed eagerly to take the flowers, maybe he’d be as weird about that as if she rejected the idea. Best to play it safe. The loudness of Neil’s breath increased from the other room. Then he was standing, walking into the kitchen. Max’s hand shook, holding tight to one of the dinner plates.

“So, you’re so busy with school you can’t take flowers to the grave of your DEAD BROTHER?” Neil’s voice was in that in-between place: angry but not yelling, not noisy. Controlled.

Max bit her lip, her mind whirring.

“Well?” Neil wasn’t giving up.

“No. I–um–want to take them, too. I didn’t mean I was too busy, just that it’ll be…a little after school.” _Good save, Mad Max. Now get out of this situation quickly and efficiently._ “Actually, I’ll work on my project right now, then I can go right after school.”

Neil glared at her. “Do you not think it prudent to prioritize respecting Billy’s death, when it was basically your fault? How do you think that makes you look to other people? ‘Maxine doesn’t even _care_ that she killed her own brother?’”

As far as Max was aware, nobody in Hawkins thought that she was in any way responsible for what happened to Billy. If anything, Max was more concerned about that than the neighbors. What stung was Neil suggesting that. He was trying to get under her skin, he got high off this and she knew she shouldn’t care. Billy’s face was flickering into her mind, possessed and angry. God damn it, she just needed to get out of this situation.

“I care a lot about Billy-” Max started, her voice shaking. She felt the heavy pain behind her eyes that came before tears, and she fought it with all her willpower.

“You care, except that you really don’t. Don’t lie, Maxine. Didn’t your mother teach you not to lie?”

Max glanced at Susan, who had risen from the table and was hovering towards the corner of the room. Always the bystander.

“I’m not lying.” She had once said this to Billy, back when he was her only aggressor, before she knew how much worse things could get.

“Don’t. Fucking. Lie.”

Water splashed into Max’s face as she dropped the plate into the sink, bracing herself as Neil’s hands landed on her shoulders. He pushed her into the counter, the hardness of the edge digging into her back. She smelled his breath, the beer he’d had with dinner wafting into her face. It would be over soon. She hadn’t avoided it but it would end. It would end. _Max, don’t be a baby, it’s going to end so just deal with it._

Neil pulled her forward and slammed her back into the counter, the pain rattling through her mind. He was still talking, words vaguely about her causing Billy’s death and her lying and her nerve at challenging him (if this was challenging him, Max didn’t know if she would ever figure out how to stop). He pushed her to the side, her hip smashing into the dining table. Then he pushed her to the floor, as if disgusted to have to look at her.

Max tried to catch Susan’s gaze, to get some kind of reaction from her motionless mother, but Neil knelt down and grabbed her dangerously hard by the wrist, hissing, “Look at me when I’m talking to you.” The tears Max had been withholding so well finally leaked their way down her face. _It will be over soon, don’t give him the satisfaction._ Neil didn’t seem to notice or care about her crying, already rising to his feet.

“Take the flowers tomorrow or I’ll hear about it,” he said with a note of finality. With that, he marched off, leaving Max on the floor.

Back when Susan and Neil had gotten together, Susan might have been less willing to stand for this, had it happened. And if it had, Max imagined that she might have gone to Max on the floor and helped her, or at least talked to her. Max imagined that she might have apologized for his behavior or hugged her. Now, Susan avoided even looking at Max as she left the kitchen behind Neil.

Max pushed herself to a sitting position, hands wiping away her tears as fast as they had slid down her cheeks. It was almost the school week, and the opportunities for Neil to hurt her then were far fewer. Next time, she would do better. It was all she could focus on: being better next time. Only four more years until college. She had survived the Mind Flayer, she could survive Neil Hargrove.

She took a pack of frozen peas from the freezer and walked cautiously to her bedroom, shutting the door and pushing a chair against it. She held the frozen peas against her side, hoping she could stop it from bruising very much if she did it quickly. Neil might be violent but he was smart about _how_ he was violent. He rarely hit her hard in the face, never gave her black eyes. Even though she knew he did that to save his own ass, to keep the neighbors from suspecting anything was wrong in their house, she was grateful for it. Nobody would ever have to find out as long as he didn’t go for her face and she didn’t let her sleeves come up too far; her wrist was already turning purple, which was the most difficult of her injuries to conceal.

When she was tired of icing her bruises and her heart rate had slowed down, Max tossed the frozen peas on the floor and started on her homework. She didn’t actually have a project due, but there was the usual work. Frustratingly, she couldn’t get her mind to concentrate on her science worksheet nor her math textbook. All she could think about was Neil. Rolling over on her bed, she reached for her walkie-talkie.

“Lucas? Do you copy? Over.”

There was a delay, then static and the comfortingly familiar voice: “Yeah, I copy, Max. What’s up? Over.”

She took a deep breath, preparing. “I know it’s weird, but will you come with me tomorrow after school to take flowers to Billy’s grave? Like seriously, don’t ask.” She pictured his face, trying to deduce what emotional place this decision was coming from, considering she had never before taken flowers to his grave. “Sorry, over.”

“Ummmm…I mean, sure. Like, can I ask why?” Confusion. “Sorry, it doesn’t matter. Over.”

“Yeah, I meant it when I said don’t ask.” She was proud of how casual her voice sounded, whether or not this was something that anyone would approach with a casual air. It’s not like she was taking the flowers because she would have ever thought of it herself, though she did feel genuine and constant sadness over Billy’s death. God, Lucas probably thought she herself had been planning this for days. “Over.”

“Okay, okay.” Lucas was definitely confused. “Do you want Mike and Dustin to come? Over.”

“If they want, it’s okay. Either way. I have to go now, uh, I haven’t started my homework. Over.”

Max had enough time to re-open her math book before Lucas’s response came through. “Max, you’re okay, right? Like I’ll go with you, definitely, but nothing’s wrong or anything, is it? I mean…you’re okay?”

His voice was so kind that Max’s eyes started to ache again, fighting not to cry. She didn’t want him to know about Neil, she didn’t want him or any of her friends to know how terrible and weak her stepfather made her feel. She wished, though, that she could be understood by him anyway. She wished she could tell him something was wrong without him ever having to know what, just to stop feeling so alone in her secret. Oh well, life was unfair.

She didn’t wait for him to say _over_ because she was pretty sure he had forgotten about it. “Yeah, yeah, I’m okay.” She dusted her eyes with the back of her hand. “Nothing’s wrong. Over.”

“Do you promise? Over.”

Promise. Promise was a sacred word in the Party. She couldn’t.

“I’m okay, Lucas. Over.”

“You don’t promise…? Over.” His voice was still soft. It was her fault for worrying him. Her own voice was probably leading him to believe something was wrong. She wasn’t being calm enough or chipper enough or whatever she needed to be to make him believe everything was fine.

“It’s just not a big deal, promise is such a big word, you know? Don’t worry about it. I really need to get my homework done now. Over.”

This time Lucas responded immediately. “Okay, see you tomorrow. Over.”

“See you tomorrow. Over.”

“You’re supposed to say ‘Over and out.’” Lucas laughed slightly, and the sound of his laughter lifted Max’s heart. “Over. Now you say it."

“Sorry! Over and out.” She set her walkie-talkie back on her bedside table and tried one last time to read the section. Talking to Lucas had made her feel better, and this time she managed to comprehend at least some of it. When she finished the section, she shut her eyes and laid still, sensing the pain resonating from the bruises on her hip, back, and wrist.

As long as she stayed in control, she would survive this. _Get a better plan, no, get better_ AT _your plan._ Next time she’d say the right thing. If she tried hard enough, she could save herself. Wonder Woman always did.


	2. Ten Dollars

**November 4, 1985**

Max woke up almost half an hour before her alarm clock rang, immediately aware of the ache she felt from the injuries Neil had inflicted upon her the night before. At first she thought this was the only reason she had woken up, but when she raised her eyes she saw Susan standing in the doorway of her bedroom, still in her pajamas.

Max pushed herself up to sit against her pillows, not sure why her mother was in her room. The last time anyone but her alarm clock had woken her up was probably, well, not since July. Billy used to scream at her to get up if he was going to drive her anywhere. Somehow, that was more welcome than her mother’s phantom-like presence.

“Sorry to disturb you, Max, but I figured if you’re going to buy flowers before school you should get a head start.” Susan’s feet shifted awkwardly. “I-uh-have money for you.”

Max had been fully anticipating being forced to pay for the flowers herself, out of her own precious savings. She was also sure that Neil would not have been forward about giving her money, so this decision had to be coming entirely from her mother. It figured; Neil left for work early, so her mother could do this without him finding out. Though this was the absolute weakest and least necessary form of rebellion Susan could have chosen, Max’s standards for her were so low it didn’t fail to be at least mildly impressive.

“I’m going to buy them after school,” Max said. She would not allow herself to show any form of gratitude whether or not she felt it. Susan was the mother who married Neil. Rebellion against him was only impressive within that context. No, she’d let her mother think giving her money meant nothing. It did mean a little.

“Oh. I thought you had a project.”

Oops. That was the kind of forgetfulness that got Max in trouble. Seriously, was she still speaking without thinking? _Stupid_. At least it was just her mother. “Yeah…I finished it last night. So…I’ll go to get them after school.”

Susan nodded, and kind of darted into the bedroom to drop a $10 bill on Max’s dresser. That was a decent amount of money. Max hated herself for imagining what $10 could do, as if it was going to do anything but buy flowers from the grocery store. She wasn’t that stupid.

As quietly as she had presumably come, Susan left. Max got up, no longer tired. She got dressed, wearing her jacket with the longest sleeves. That one came in clutch in specific circumstances, like now, when her wrist was a pale canvas for multiple intense red and purple marks, trailing down almost to her hand. She didn’t remember Neil grabbing her _that_ painfully, but her wrist seemed to disagree with her own recollection.

When Max was ready for school, her hair combed somewhat neatly and her barely finished homework stuffed in her backpack, she headed for the kitchen. Susan was sitting at the table the same way she had been last night. She looked anxious, which bothered Max; Neil was someone to be anxious around, not her. It made her feel like garbage that her own mother was afraid to speak freely in front of her.

Max grabbed a banana off the counter and started to leave, but something made her pause. She could feel her mother’s eyes on her, and she turned to face them, wishing it was easier to stay frustrated with her.

“Thanks for the money, Mom,” she offered, unable to make actual eye contact. “I know you didn’t have to.”

Susan smiled. “It’s not fair to make you pay for them yourself, you’re going for all of us. Because we-um-all miss him. So no reason for you to pay.”

Max had her doubts about Susan’s honestly missing Billy. There was probably more guilt and regret in that equation. “Well, _he_ would have made me pay, you know he would. So thanks.” Should she have said it? Maybe not. Maybe it was unfair.

Susan didn’t argue in defense of Neil, which surprised Max. She just waved goodbye as Max started to head out the door. Max waved back, annoyed at herself for wishing there had been more, that they could talk about Neil for real. But they had never, and they would never, and Max had to accept it.

Max was predictably early to school, having left thirty minutes earlier than normal. The parking lot was pretty empty, as was the front. Max took a seat on the curb, waiting for her friends. Skateboarding to school took a long time, so she needed to catch her breath anyway. She drummed her fingers on the cement, impatient. After a few minutes, she stood up and decided to skate around in a loop, the entrance still clear enough that she probably wasn’t disrupting anyone. She was mid-spin when she heard Mike’s voice calling out to her.

Weird, Mike usually came to school with Lucas and Dustin, later than this. He looked equally surprised to see her, which made sense since she was usually the last of their Party to arrive, not the first. She hopped off her skateboard and walked towards him.

“Why are you here so early?” He asked her, before she could ask him the same question.

She shrugged, the truth not that interesting and not something she felt like explaining. “My mom woke me up too early. I didn’t feel like hanging out at my house. Why are you here?”

She was pretty sure Mike blushed. He sort of tilted his head, in that way he did when he didn’t want anyone to know he was embarrassed. It probably didn’t help that she was giving him a mildly judgmental look. It was just kind of automatic. When he spoke, it was in a purposeful tone, like he was refusing to be embarrassed, which was respectable. “I came to call El on the pay phone before school.”

“Like, maybe I’m being dumb, but don’t you have a phone at your own house?”

Mike shook his head, clearly annoyed at something. “My mom. She listens in on the phone sometimes, it’s so annoying. I’ll meet you guys here before school.” Max nodded, not particularly caring. It would suck if her own mother listened in on her phone conversations. Or Neil. God, that idea was frightening. It occurred to Max that to El it was also the anniversary of Hopper’s death. She would call her later. Mike disappeared around the corner and Max went back to doing circles on her skateboard, which was harder now that school was becoming busier and busier.

Mike came back eventually, before Lucas and Dustin got there. She continued to skateboard until the entrance grew too packed with people and she had to retire to the curb next to Mike.

“Is Eleven definitely coming for Thanksgiving?” Max questioned him, even though last time she checked nobody knew for sure, which was irritating. She spoke to Eleven on the phone often herself, and she missed her a lot. Maybe she’d start calling El from school if listening in on the phone was common. She pictured Neil on the kitchen extension, listening to her and El talk about Ralph Macchio and the newest Wonder Woman comics. Gross.

“She has to. My mom will say yes, she’s just putting it off.”

“So you don’t know? Shouldn’t you, like wild idea I know, ask her again, maybe?” Max didn’t understand how with a mom as nice as Mrs. Wheeler, Mike wouldn’t have already pressured a yes out of her.

Mike rolled his eyes. “Why don’t _you_ ask her then? I’m going to ask her, god.”

“Yeah, why don’t _I_ ask _your_ mother? I wonder.” Max sort of relished in getting on Mike’s nerves, just as he did to her. When she’d first met her friends he had had a true grudge against her, but now neither of them questioned that they were friends or that she was in the Party. They just couldn’t help but bicker.

Max had been rolling her skateboard back and forth underneath her foot, and before Mike could respond it slipped out of her reach and rolled forwards. She jumped up and reached for it with her foot, just barely tapping the edge enough to reach forward with her hand and pick it up. As she sat back down onto the curb, Mike gestured to her wrist, which had been exposed as she grabbed for her skateboard.

“What happened to you?” She felt his eyes lingering on the marks left by Neil the night before.

As quickly as she could without making a big deal of it, she tugged her jacket sleeve back down, hoping the few seconds of exposure wasn’t enough for Mike–who was more accustomed to the kinds of violence that creatures from other dimensions caused–to form any real opinions. Maybe she shouldn’t act like it was a secret, to get in the clear, but she was deeply uncomfortable with anyone thinking she was injured for any reason.

“Just accidentally slammed a door on my hand,” she said, exaggerating her voice like she thought she was so dumb for doing it.

“Does that even happen?” Mike was giving her a weird look. She gave him one back. “Who shuts their hand in the door? Can you even do that?” He appeared to be mentally shutting a door to decide if it was possible. Max wasn’t even sure it was. She’d have to be an idiot to shut her own hand in a door.

“Clearly it does,” Max insisted. “You’ve probably shut your head in a door before, let’s be honest.” Sarcasm was useful. Sarcasm and nonchalance combined were perfect weapons to avoiding anything. She had learned to lie from her father, but that she had learned from Billy. Yet another thing she owed him, really.

Mike rolled his eyes practically to the back of his head, but then they went back to her wrist. “But like, seriously, did you actually?”

“ _Yessss_ , I said I did, keep up.” Max felt her stomach flip-flopping a little. She was doing well for herself at the moment, but she hated feeling exposed, even the tiniest amount. She tried not think that Mike might not forget this conversation instantly just because she said the right thing. If she could play this off, he would forget and nothing would become of this. That had to be true. She wasn’t going to play it off if she let her anxiety get the better of her, however.

“Wait, show it to me.” He was reaching for her sleeve. _Seriously, Mike, stop_ , she mentally pleaded.

“No, god, it’s fine!” She didn’t exactly raise her voice, but it was not the tone that it needed to be. Mike raised his eyebrows at her. She made a face that she hoped showed that she was just bored or annoyed or something in that vein.

Luckily, they were finally interrupted by Lucas and Dustin’s arrival. Max leapt up, as did Mike, going to meet them as they locked up their bikes. Max half expected Mike to say something about her being stupid enough to shut her hand in the door, but he didn’t, and they began talking about how they should go see Mr. Clarke after school. Lucas glanced at Max, as if questioning if he should say anything about going to Billy’s grave. Her mind made up, she half-shook her head. Dustin and Mike were still her best friends, but she didn’t want them to come. Not when her motivations were shoddy at best, and she hardly wanted to go herself.

“I can’t go,” Lucas interjected as Dustin and Mike made plans to try to reach Will with Mr. Clarke’s new big ham radio. “Max and I have a…uh… _thing_ after school.”

God, Lucas was terrible at any sort of misdirection whatsoever.

“He means his mom is driving us to the movie theater to see _A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2_ ,” Max added quickly. Then, “There wasn’t room for all of us since she’s driving Erica, too. Sorry.”

Dustin and Mike both chorused _“What the hell!”_ , pissed off, but the lie was believed. Lucas and Mike disappeared down one hallway to their shared Spanish class, Mike bitching about Lucas choosing Max to go when they had seen the original movie together, and Lucas pointing out all the times Mike had chosen Eleven over the party. Dustin waved as he went to his English class and Max went off alone to science, temporarily pacified.

After school, Max met Lucas outside his algebra class instead of at their usual spot in front of school. He grinned at her and she smiled back. She was always happy to hang out with him, even given the circumstances. She would really much prefer to be going to the movie theater, but alas.

After Max got her skateboard from her locker, they walked slowly out of school. Neither explicitly mentioned that they were avoiding Dustin and Mike but a mutual understanding was shared between them. Dustin’s and Mike’s bikes were already gone from the rack when Lucas unlocked his bike, so they’d obviously already vanished to the realm of Hawkins Middle.

“We have to go to the grocery store first to buy flowers,” Max informed Lucas as rolled his bike off the curb.

“Shit, aren’t they, like, expensive?” Lucas knew she didn’t have very much money, except her super secret precious savings. He was always using the money his mom gave him to pay for her, which she hated but also really appreciated.

“My mom gave me ten bucks.”

“Damn. Wait, was this her idea?” Oh yeah, she’d forgotten to mention that part. This whole time Lucas was still thinking she was doing this because she was on some kind of emotional journey. She looked at his face, staring intently back at her, and was secretly touched at how he would handle it if she actually was.

“Yeah, she insisted, and then my stepdad insisted, so I had to. I don’t actually want to take flowers to his grave. I mean, that’s weird. Like sure, I miss him, but, like, flowers…” She didn’t know where to go with this. She hoped Lucas understood.

“Yeah, I get it. But do you really have to?” They were moving now, out of the school parking lot. “It’s not like they’d ever even know.”

Max focused her eyes forward. “They might.”

“Probably not…Let’s go, though. Just to be safe. It seems right.” She knew he was looking at her again. Biking required less direct concentration.

“Yeah, to be safe. Lucas, I swear I’m not going because I want to, though.” Why was it important that he know that? Because it was, to her.

“I know.”

There was silence for about thirty seconds as they glided down the street, headed for Bradley’s Big Buy. It was a peaceful silence, filled with the sounds of high school kids’ cars going by. It was during moments like these, skating along with Lucas or even all of her friends, that Max wished the world would freeze frame and she’d be left like that. So far, zero of said wishes had been granted.

Lucas didn’t wait for her to say something but spoke again. “I know you’re not, but it would be okay if you were going because you want to, you know.”

Lucas was still behind her so his voice was quieted by the wind, but Max heard him. She used her foot to slow down a bit and risked a glance at him, which he returned for a half-second. “I’m not going because I want to, but…I don’t mind going,” she admitted. “It’s a good thing to do, don’t you think?” She had to talk loud enough for him to hear her, and it was strange to say that loudly.

“Yeah, I think so.”

She was glad he thought so.

Neither of them said anything for the rest of the trip to Bradley’s Big Buy. Around ten minutes later, they were walking into the store, Lucas’s bike locked out front and Max’s skateboard half-shoved into her unzipped backpack.

The flower department was not large, but considering Max had never been particularly aware of the store having a flower department of any size, she supposed it was satisfactory. She and Lucas both circled the display, picking up different bouquets to look exclusively at the price tag. What sort of flowers did you even leave on a gravestone? Black ones? There were no black flowers.

“Hey, these are only seven dollars,” Lucas said, showing her a bouquet of blue flowers. “You could keep three dollars.” Max knew next to nothing about flowers, so she had no idea if they were nice ones or not. It was the gesture that counted, anyway. Even Neil probably wouldn’t care if she left ugly flowers. She took the bouquet from Lucas’s outstretched hands and studied it briefly before nodding.

“I mean, they’re fine, aren’t they?” She laughed. He gave her his _I have no freaking idea_ face, and she laughed harder, him starting to laugh too. “Okay, these ones.”

She fished in her jeans pocket for the ten dollar bill, which she hadn’t trusted not to fall out of her backpack. At the checkout, the cashier glanced back and forth between her and the flowers. “Visiting a sick family member?”

“No, a dead one.” She said, deadpan. It was a physical challenge not to laugh until they’d left the store, releasing all the stress that had been pent up inside of her. She replaced the skateboard’s spot in her backpack with the bouquet, hoping it didn’t get smashed on their way to the graveyard.

“Ready to go?” Lucas looked right into her eyes, their laughter fading but the relaxed feeling remaining.

She nodded. “Let’s go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who has reviewed this story so far! I will definitely post the third chapter tomorrow at the latest.
> 
> I tend to use a lot of detail when I'm writing because I want everything to tie together really well, but my chapters have been fairly long. Please let me know if you find all the details annoying and you want me to go faster in the story. I wasn't expecting to not even get to the graveyard haha, I just kept adding things until it felt like I should end the chapter.


	3. I Love You

Unsurprisingly, nobody else was at the graveyard when Max and Lucas arrived. Max herself hadn’t been back there since Billy’s funeral, which had taken place a few days after Hopper’s. Those were the bad days, back in July. Most of the time, she avoided thinking about them. It was hard, unfortunately, not to remember the worst details of both funerals while standing there, so close to where Billy’s had taken place (Hopper’s was held exclusively in the nearby church, because there was no body to bury). Hopper’s had been extremely sad, but Max had at least focused on Eleven, and known how she was supposed to react. It was sad. Period.

Billy dying was messy. It was sad, yes, sadder than Hopper’s death could ever make Max feel simply because Billy was _her_ family. _Her_ step-brother. But there were so many people who might disagree with her had they known Billy like she did, and that bothered her. Had they seen the way he treated her sometimes, the things he had done even before being possessed by the Mind Flayer…well, they might say she shouldn’t feel sad. Nobody in her life actually said that, not even Neil. Her friends were supportive, and they certainly were more gracious towards Billy considering he had saved Eleven’s life. He wasn’t the villain to any of them. He wasn’t the villain to Max, either, but he was not a hero.

That in-between made it hard for her to know how she was supposed to feel. She’d let herself feel sad until she felt like it was time to stop. Showing it, that is. Inside, the ache was constant, stronger than any physical pain Neil could cause her. _That_ had made it worse, too: Neil. She understood, now, what Billy had experienced. And she wished, though she would never admit it to a single living soul, that she had done more when Billy was alive. She’d known then that Neil hurt him, and she thought she knew what it felt like, but she hadn’t, not really. And yes, Billy had pushed her away angrily whenever she saw the way he was treated, whenever she tried to help. But she still should have done more.

Max removed the bouquet from her backpack, relieved it was not squashed. She wondered if Billy liked the color blue; not shockingly, they had never discussed what their favorite colors were. He probably did, he wore so damn much denim.

“Do you know where it is?” Lucas asked her, talking about Billy’s grave. He was surveying the area, but all the graves looked the same, just at various stages of breaking down. Billy’s, of course, was brand new. And Max did know where it was. She couldn’t easily forget it.

Careful not to step on any of the dying flowers littering the area, Max walked steadily through the mass of gravestones to the newest one. **Billy Hargove, 1967-1985. Loved and missed, now and for the rest of our lives.** Max wasn’t sure who had come up with the quote, but it was probably Neil. She didn’t know whether or not he loved and missed Billy, but she guessed it was theoretically possible.

Staring down at it, she felt Lucas next to her. It was so quiet she could hear him breathing. Her feet, in her bright red Converse, looked stupid next to the grey of the gravestone. She felt stupid in general next to the gravestone.

“Do I just leave it there?” Max said, to say something. If she didn’t, this was going to become surreal too fast. She ran her fingers along the plastick-y material that encased the bouquet in her hands.

“Uh, yeah? I think?” Lucas sounded even less certain than her.

Max started to take the plastic off the bouquet, figuring it was tacky to leave it on. And it might kill birds. It was difficult to remove, like the ends of it were literally glued to the stems of the flowers. Max grew frustrated as she tried to pull the stems out of the plastic to no avail. “Seriously, just come off!” She snapped, feeling tears dot her eyes. She didn’t want this to be the straw that broke the camel’s back, she needed to hold it together.

Lucas reached for the flowers to help her, but she pulled them away. “No, don’t break them.”

“I think I can take plastic off some flowers-”

“You think it’s easy, but look at me trying, it’s not.”

“Okay, I surrender.” Lucas held up his hands. Max rolled her eyes, but her heart wasn’t in it and he knew it.

She offered him the top half of bouquet and he held it still while she tore off the plastic, some pieces of the stems peeling off with it. “Are you kidding me…”

“Come on, they look just as good,” Lucas reassured her, holding them up as if to demonstrate the beauty they still possessed. She subtly swiped her hand across her face to wipe the tear that had dripped down and offered him a half-sarcastic, half-appreciative smile, then took the flowers back from him.

Leaning forward, she placed the bouquet against the hard stone, ensuring it didn’t fall down. She paused, taking in the site, then took a slight step back, unsure how to proceed. She didn’t know how she felt about religion herself, or if she believed in heaven at all, but she imagined that Billy was watching her. Would he go to heaven? Yes. She felt the familiar pang that she did every time she remembered him saying _sorry_ right before he died.

“Do you want to, like, say something? Are you…supposed to do that?” Lucas voiced what she was thinking.

“You’re probably supposed to.” She didn’t know if she wanted to.

“Do you want to?”

“I don’t know.”

Max felt Lucas’s hand against her own, and she grabbed it. She saw his face focused on her out of the corner of her eye. She glanced at him, and his expression melted away her fear that he might judge her. Taking a deep breath, she began: “Um, Billy…I’m sorry. Too. I’m sorry, too.” What was she sorry for? Too many things. “I miss you. Kind of. No, sorry, I do miss you. I really miss you. I’m sorry.”

Lucas squeezed her hand but neither of them said anything for almost an entire minute. Hot tears silently rolled down Max’s cheeks. She kicked at the dirt that was scattered beneath the gravestone; she had seen them drop that dirt down, burying Billy underneath the soil. Then he was gone. He was gone before that, of course. He was gone even before they went to the mall.

“That’s all,” Max said, breaking the silence. She stepped back further, distancing herself from the grave, and let go of Lucas’s hand. She used her arm to wipe her eyes, this time careful to use the arm that was not bruised in case her sleeve came up. Lucas’s eyes hovered over her arm as she did this, but Max chose to ignore it; at this precise moment she refused to think about what Mike might have said to Lucas when it was probably fine.

Lucas made eye contact with her and she met his gaze. She would _not_ be embarrassed about this, she wouldn’t. Okay, she was a little, but Lucas’s expression was so pure that she knew it was okay. “Do you want to leave now?” She asked.

“Do you?” Oh yeah, they were sort of here entirely because of her.

“Yeah.”

She walked slowly but steadily back across the graveyard, Lucas walking so close to her that his arm brushed hers. It was after four o’clock now, and the air was growing colder. Max shivered, pulling her sleeves over her hands and hunching her shoulders. Soon, they were back where they had left Lucas’s bike and her skateboard.

“Hey, you don’t have anything to be sorry for,” Lucas said out of the blue, facing her as they picked up their backpacks. “You know what happened to Billy wasn’t your fault.”

Max somewhat knew that. She had considered every possible scenario where she stopped Billy from getting possessed or where she got the Mind Flayer to leave him before he died, but she knew it was unlikely that she could have changed what happened. If she had, anyway, Eleven might have died, and that wasn’t something she wished. She hadn’t been apologizing for Billy’s death, however. She was intently sorry about his life before he died, their relationship before he died. Even if the problems were mainly his fault, she should have been better and _that_ was what she was sorry for. She couldn’t explain it to Lucas, who didn’t know the things she did.

“I know, I didn’t mean it like that. There are other ways a person can be sorry, you know,” she added with an air of friendly sarcasm.

Lucas looked away for a second, thoughtful. “Well, what else are you sorry for?”

“I guess…a lot of things.” Her eyes were getting wet again. “I could’ve been better to him, that’s all.”

“But he was mean to _you_. You don’t have to be sorry for that. Unless you want to be.” She recognized that he was trying not to tell her what to feel.

“I guess it’s more complicated than that.” Hesitation. “He just didn’t deserve everything.”

Max didn’t know if Lucas still thought she was only talking about the Mind Flayer, or if he understood there was more to it. He didn’t ask her to tell him what she meant, he only smiled encouragingly. Without much thought, she moved forward and hugged him, his arms going as much around her as they could with her backpack sticking out. She didn’t hold on for very long, but it was enough. She stepped back, still close to him, and smiled. She felt warm inside, like she had a long time ago on the roof of that abandoned school bus.

Lucas’s expression had changed, his mouth opened like he wanted to say something. “I, uh, I think that…I mean…” he began, then stopped again, her giving him a weird look. “I’m trying to say something,” he clarified, as if she hadn’t gotten that part.

“Really, I thought you were just testing your voice box out,” she raised her eyebrows and grinned, proud of her response.

“Remember when Mike was like talking about Eleven and stuff and he was all like ‘she shouldn’t do this because she’s going to get brain damage’ and you were all like ‘she’s not your pet, Mike’ and he was getting pissed off and the rest of us were just like ‘what the hell’ and stuff?”

She knew immediately what he was talking about and what he was trying to say, but she didn’t want to make it easy for him. “And then Mike went like ‘your girlfriend spied on us’ and was pissed off about that, so you’re trying to tell me not to spy on you with Eleven anymore? She can’t even do that anymore, so don’t worry.”

“No, that’s not what-”

“Or do you mean the other part about how he didn’t want anything to happen to her, because…” she bugged her eyes out, like _you know what he said and so do I_.

“Yes! That part.”

“What part?”

“I love you.” There was no hesitation this time; she had annoyed the nervousness out of him, just like she had intended to do.

The warm feeling that she felt with him was so clear to her that there was no thought involved. “I love you too, Lucas.” Her heart thudded in her chest a bit, just because this was a big moment even if she’d known it for a while and he presumably had too. She almost forgot she was standing in an empty graveyard. She did feel slightly guilty that during such a pivotal exchange she couldn’t help but imagine El’s reaction to the news rather than be fully engaged in the moment, but that was probably normal.

They stood there looking at each other, both content to do so, until Max dropped her skateboard on the ground and gestured for them to get going. “Where to?” She hoped the day wouldn’t be messed up by her having to go home so early. On one hand the sooner she got home the sooner she could call El, on the other hand even that wasn’t a good enough reason for her not to dread going home.

“Well, we couldn’t be back from the movies yet, so we can’t really go over to Mike’s.” True, but that sucked.

“We could say that your mom couldn’t end up taking us. Then they wouldn’t be mad at us anymore.” She was a genius sometimes.

“Okay, they’re probably complaining about us right now anyway. Mike’s probably like ‘I can’t believe he’s taking Max, I’d never do anything with El over Lucas!’” They both burst out laughing, flying down the street faster now that they knew their destination. Max wasn’t cold anymore, even with the wind blowing against her face. It felt nice.

The Wheeler’s garage door was open, Dustin’s bike visible next to Mike’s. Lucas abandoned his bike there but Max kept her skateboard, rolling it along the grass to the side door into the basement with her foot. She held up her hand and knocked, the indistinguishable of Mike and Dustin audible through the door.

Mike pulled the door open, obviously having already seen them through the glass because he didn’t react to it being them. “What happened to _A Nightmare on Elm Street?_ ” He asked, definitely sounding like he and Dustin had been complaining before they arrived.

“My mom got busy and couldn’t take us, so no reason to be mad anymore,” Lucas said cheerily, pushing past Mike into the basement. “We can just all watch it together when it comes out on video.”

Max pushed past Mike, too, leaving her skateboard outside the door. Mike was evidently stunned at the news, but recovered rapidly. “You guys were still _going_ to see it without us, so it counts just the same.”

“So you didn’t tell El that you’d watch _Return of the Jedi_ with her when it comes out on video, like two days after we said we’d all rewatch it together?” Max scoffed.

“How do you even know about that?”

“El said so.”

Mike held up his hands as if so frustrated it was manifesting itself physically. “How much do you talk about me, Jesus?”

“Relax, not that much, you’re not that interesting.”

Mike flipped her off, then they moved on, the disagreement about the movie over.

Dustin had E.T. out on video until Wednesday, and even though they’d already watched it Mike and Dustin had started rewatching it and were twenty minutes in. Max flopped down next to Lucas on the floor in front of the TV, which Mr. Wheeler had given to them in a random burst of kindness a few months ago.

An hour or so had passed when there was a sound at the top of the basement stairs, and the door came open. Mrs. Wheeler’s voice came echoing down: “Is Max here?” Max didn’t think she had ever been the subject of Mrs. Wheeler’s inquiries, so that was strange.

She swiveled around as Mike yelled without getting up, “YES MOM, SHE IS!”

“Tell her to come up here, her dad’s here to pick her up! And don’t yell so loudly!”

What? Max’s heartbeat sped up. Neil had literally never picked her up anywhere. Seriously, she wasn’t sure if she had ridden in his car since they moved from California. There was no reason why he should be there. He barely knew Mike’s family existed, let alone where she spent most of her time.

She found her feet moving along the carpet towards the staircase, her backpack slung over her shoulder. Her friends chorused “bye” to her and she called it back as she climbed the stairs. Mrs. Wheeler smiled at her like it was totally normal for her to be getting picked up like this.

Max wildly imagined that it was her real dad picking her up, that he had flown out to surprise her and wanted to go get milkshakes and hang out. No such luck; Neil was standing in the entryway of the Wheeler house, looking infuriatingly put-together. She refused to look at his face, turning instead to thank Mrs. Wheeler for having her despite not having seen her the entire time she was there. She contemplated saying she couldn’t go home yet because she was working on something important with her friends, but the idea wasn’t serious. Whatever Neil said here in the comfort of the Wheelers’ house would have no meaning compared to what he said and did in the comfort of his own house. Best to go with him and hope he wasn’t here because she had unknowingly done something absolutely terrible that he was going to kill her for.

Neil said some bullshit about being glad Mrs. Wheeler was so kind to his daughter and then held the door for Max to leave. His car was parked in front of the house and she walked briskly to it so he wouldn’t run into her whilst following her. She got into the front seat and put on her seatbelt before he even got to the car door.

Riding with Billy had been a chilling experience in many instances, but it had never been like this. Billy blasted music and said shitty things to her to get under her skin, but she was accustomed to the pattern of things and had often been willing to risk her fate to argue with him a little. This–riding with Neil alone–was a scenario she had never been in and didn’t know what to expect from. He didn’t play loud rock music but instead classical music turned down so low you could hardly make it out. And he didn’t growl at her but instead said nothing at first, as if she didn’t even exist.

After a couple minutes, Max realized they weren’t going home but were on their way to the graveyard. The road was narrower as they pulled up to it, the trees clearing out on one side where the gravestones were. It looked different from her position in the passenger seat of the car, and she didn’t feel the way she had earlier today, just confused. Why were they there?

“So you took the flowers like your mother told you to do, didn’t you?” Neil spoke for the first time, his voice super low. “I figured you’d lie whether or not you did, and I got off work early so I figured we’d see if you really did.”

Max had never actually considered not taking the flowers and lying about it, but she was exceedingly relieved that she had done as she was told. Of course it would come back to her if she disobeyed Neil. She was right. She didn’t want to be right.

“I did, you can go see them. They’re here. I brought them here like two hours ago.”

Neil studied her with his icy blue eyes, then turned around and got out of the car. She didn’t know if she was supposed to go with him so she elected not to. He didn’t seem to care, shutting the door and heading out among the gravestones to find Billy’s. She saw the blue flowers at the base of the grave and let out a huge breath. She had had the irrational fear that something would have happened to the flowers and he would have thought she never left them. _Thank you, God_.

Neil didn’t stay at the grave long. He definitely didn’t say words to Billy or have profound thoughts about the death of his son. He looked down at the flowers, paused, and came back to the car. Max pretended to be fascinated with the dashboard.

“Good, you did as you were told,” was all Neil said. He put the key back into the ignition and started the car, doing a u-turn and driving back onto the narrow road. Yes, she did as she was told. How was it that she hated herself for that, like she’d ever do any different with the threat of Neil so close? She’d never understand all of the things that went through her own mind.

Not another word was said for the entire ten minute drive home. At some point Max remembered she’d left her skateboard at the Wheelers’ and inwardly cursed herself. It was going to take her over an hour to walk to school the next day. As soon as Neil’s car was no longer in motion, she jumped out and hurried across the lawn, careful not to go too fast so Neil wouldn’t think she was running away from him. In a flash she was in her room, the door shut behind her. Safe for now.

Deciding to chance that Neil was a serial eavesdropper (she honestly doubted it), she grabbed the phone and stretched the cord across the room until she was seated in the corner. She dialed the Byers’ phone number from memory. She hoped it would be El who answered, because the Byers’ phone had caller ID. She had a 50/50 shot of it being El or Will because there was no way Joyce was home yet.

“Max?” El’s voice, happy.

“El! You are NOT going to believe what I have to tell you.” Max wanted to give a little buildup for her news so El understood how exciting it was. Max had been the one to explain to El how exciting the word “love” was in the first place.

“What do you have to tell me?” Max heard a door shut as El probably carried the phone into her own bedroom.

“Lucas said ‘I love you today.’” The news sounded crazy out of her own mouth, too, even though she’d been a witness to the actual event. Not crazy crazy, but good crazy.

Eleven’s voice was excited too. “Big news!” She agreed, her voice joyful. “Now we both have ‘I love you.’”

“Yeah, now we both have it,” Max laughed and El joined in. “I wish you were here.”

“Thanksgiving,” El reminded her, her voice more subdued at the acknowledgment of the distance between them.

“Yeah, Thanksgiving.”

Not wanting to be down about El and Will being so far away, Max changed the subject, talking about watching E.T. and school. She avoided mention of Neil, and he did not come up. They talked on the phone for about twenty minutes before Max knew she should hang up so the call wasn’t super expensive. She said goodbye and instantly felt alone, only the evening ahead in front of her.

Max went to the bathroom to wash her face, mainly to have something to do. But when she returned to her bedroom, Neil was inside, holding something that looked suspiciously like the San Francisco street car piggy bank in which she kept her money.

“Ten dollars was missing from my bedroom,” Neil said. Max’s stomach whirled. “Since I can only assume you stole it to buy those flowers, I’ll be taking ten dollars back.” In his hand was a ten dollar bill. _Her_ money.

“I didn’t take ten dollars from you!” She exclaimed, horrified. “It was-I mean, I didn’t.” She couldn’t throw her mother under the bus. She had never seen Neil yell at Susan, namely because Susan never fought back about _anything_. If Neil discovered that she’d taken the money, he’d have reason to be angry at her. Maybe when her mother heard about this, she’d be grateful that Max saved her. Maybe then she’d admit that something was wrong with this family.

“You didn’t? And who did?” His eyes bore into her like knives. Stiffly, he set the bank on her dresser, not even back under her bed where it belonged. How did he know where to find it in the first place? “Don’t lie, Max. You take ten dollars from me, I take ten dollars from you. You haven’t lost anything.”

His shoulder slammed against her as he forced his way past her. She watched her money disappear before her eyes but said nothing. She wanted to snatch it from him, tell him it was his own wife who had taken it and was too scared to admit it. Her money was more important than whatever pain he would cause to her. Wasn’t it? She thought it was, but yet she said nothing, so maybe it wasn’t. _You’re a baby, Max_.

Sinking onto the floor, she buried her face into her hands and screamed without making a real sound. Susan had to be somewhere in the house, had to have heard this, but still there was no ownership of the thievery. It wasn’t like she wanted her mother to get in trouble with Neil, but that was _her_ money.

She’d almost had enough to buy a bus ticket out of Hawkins, which she’d been saving for without any real plan to follow through on the purchase. Now that she had one more reason to actually do it, she didn’t have enough money.

She punched her mattress with her fists over and over again until she was exhausted. _Billy would have let him have the money, too_. This thought reassured her, then didn’t. What was she doing, pretending she could be in control, if even Billy couldn’t handle Neil?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For some reason this chapter took me literal hours to write, but I finally finished it! I don't plan to have Max run away next chapter or anything, I just wanted to start leading into the idea. At first I was expecting this chapter to be shorter than the others but then I decided not to end it and keep writing so it became a lot longer. I appreciate any feedback because I can get inspired by any random thing out there honestly! Thank you for reading!
> 
> Chapter 4 will be out tomorrow :)


	4. Lies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I always feel like because stories start on a specific day, a ton of things happen in unrealistic succession. I skipped a few days forward because it makes more sense that way in my opinion; while in stories we focus on specific plot points, a lot of normal stuff happens in between (even when your life is messed up)! I hope it seems reasonable that all of these things are happening close together, but keep in mind a ton of time is being left out of each day so I THINK the different things happening when they do makes sense?
> 
> Please let me know if you find anything unrealistic because that's honestly the #1 most important thing to me when I write is realism.

**November 8, 1985**

The morning after Neil stole Max’s money, Max had woken up early to walk to school only to have her mother offer to drive her. Max knew she did it because she was guilty about the money, even though neither of them talked about it. Regardless, it was nice to ride with her mother, conversing vaguely about uncontroversial topics.

That was the most eventful thing that had happened in days. It was Friday now, both the best and the worst day of the week. It was the best day because on Fridays Max and the Party always hung out until late at night, trying to reach Will’s radio with Dustin’s giant ham radio (Cerebro) and then playing games at the Palace Arcade until they ran out of money. It was the worst day because it kickstarted the weekend, which Neil spent almost in its entirety at home. In this case, however, the good outweighed the bad. Max was excited for this week to be over; Monday had been enough of a day to encompass the entire week.

The day started off normally. Max got up, skated to school, met her friends, then went to science. After science came Spanish with Dustin, then English, then lunch. She trekked her way from the back of the school all the way to the cafeteria. It wasn’t really a long walk, just long enough that she was always the last of her friends to get there. They were all sitting at the lunch table when she exited the lunch line with her tray of subpar cafeteria food.

The cafeteria was a busy place, way busier than lunches at Hawkins Middle School had been. They usually ate fast and went outside in lieu of being surrounded by hordes of high school kids for the entire lunch period. They chatted about nothing of real importance: what they were doing for their science projects in each of their separate classes, how much it sucked that they were all in separate science classes.

As they stood up to go outside only a few minutes later, Max noticed someone looking at her in her peripheral vision. She tilted her head until her vision was clear enough to see that it was a girl with permed red hair. She was positive she’d seen her before but she didn’t know where. She was sort of generic-looking overall. What wasn’t generic was her intent stare at Max, eyes sparkling like she’d just thought of something funny.

“Do you guys know her?” Max said in a low voice, gesturing with her head in the vague direction of the girl. “Am I crazy or is she looking at me?”

Ever lacking subtlety, all three boys immediately stared straight at the girl. Max facepalmed. “I didn’t say look right at her, what the hell.”

“I’ve seen her before, she used to hang out with Steve maybe,” Mike offered. “I don’t know who she is.”

“She’s Carol.” All four of them jumped at the light, singsongy voice. The girl–Carol–was now in front of them, twirling a strand of puffy hair around her finger. “I had no idea Billy’s baby sister went to school here now.” She was looking at Max, only Max.

What even? Max wasn’t intimidated, even though this girl was clearly as old as Nancy. She was barely taller than Max, for god’s sake. “Have since September,” Max informed her, contorting her face into one of sarcastic bewilderment. “Guess you’re not very observant?”

Carol smiled. “Guess you’re good at hiding. It would make sense, since you’re probably hiding something about Billy’s death. He was here one day and then just…gone? And you were there, I heard.”

The newspaper hadn’t mentioned anything about Max or the rest of them, but people talked. Max had never personally heard anything about Billy’s death being sinister, because the government and the papers had chalked all the deaths up to a fire at the mall. Carol obviously didn’t know anything, she was just taunting. She was probably in love with Billy before he died. Meanwhile, Billy probably didn’t who she was.

“I wasn’t, actually. What do you want from me?”

Behind her, Dustin chimed in: “Yeah, what do you even want?”

Carol exchanged knowing glances with a couple of her friends, two girls in colorful sweaters and bright blue jeans. “Billy asked me to go driving with him last year, and I dropped my, um, bracelet in his car. I was hoping I could get it back.”

That was so random that Max was genuinely bewildered. “Why didn’t you ask him last year?”

“I did and he ignored me, so I’m asking you now. Get it?” Her friends giggled.

“It’s a _bracelet_. I think you’ll live.” Max wasn’t about to search Billy’s car for some random girl’s abandoned bracelet. She put her hands on her hips. This was cutting into their lunch time and it was irritating.

Carol rolled her eyes. “What, are you scared?”

“Scared of a bracelet?” This conversation was so weird and so unnecessary that Max started to walk past Carol, ready to leave. Carol’s next comeback made her stop in her tracks.

“Scared your step-daddy will attack you if you go in Billy’s car or something?”

Max elected not to look at her friends’ faces attempting to deduce what Carol meant. She was too busy formulating an expression to go on her own face. It felt like someone had kicked her in the stomach. She’d best play it dumb, play it off. But how did Carol know that about Neil? No way Billy confided in her. At most they had gone for a drive and had sex and then never talked again. She leveled her voice and said in her most bored tone, “What does that even mean?”

“Come on, you know what I mean. Looks like your friends don’t.” Max’s hands were sweating. “Maybe Billy’s dad reserved it for his son I guess. Does he not hit you because you’re still a baby?”

“What does this have to do with a bracelet?” Lucas shot out before Max got the chance to say anything herself. His voice shook; he was mad on her behalf. God, he wasn’t supposed to think she needed defending against these ridiculous claims. Not so “ridiculous,” yeah, but _he_ should think they were ridiculous.

To Max’s surprise, Carol waved her hand carelessly. “Nothing, I got my bracelet back last year. I went to your house to get it, Max, and saw…well, you can guess. I was just screwing with you. You don’t make it very hard.” She laughed and it echoed, combined with the identical laughs of her friends. She and her friends disappeared among the sea of people in the cafeteria.

Of course this was just something stupid. It was stupid, Max agreed. If Carol had said anything else it would mean nothing to her. But the part about Neil…in front of her friends…she wanted to scream. No time for screaming, though: she needed to snap back from this like five seconds ago.

Without verifying that her friends were following her, Max continued to move out of the cafeteria as they had been before they were rudely interrupted. Once outside in the chilly weather, she risked facing them. They all looked wholeheartedly confused and not much else.

“I don’t know what the hell that was,” she broached. “God, Billy made girls crazy.” Eye roll. Annoyed look.

“Yeah, what’s all that about your stepdad?” Dustin wasted no time. He sounded truly curious, not accusatory at least. Mike appeared equally curious, while Lucas was more subdued; he knew already that things in Max’s family were shitty sometimes, though he knew nothing about Neil ever having actually hit Billy or Max.

“What, about him hitting Billy?” As if it was so ridiculous to her that she’d barely noticed. “Bullshit, Billy and my stepdad used to just yell at each other all the time. Carol probably walked in on them fighting.” She shrugged.

It was impossible to detect exactly how much they believed her; likely it was somewhere in between what she was saying and the truth. “Come on,” she continued, “who even was that girl? Who cares what happened between her and Billy last year?”

They all shrugged, practically on cue. None of them pushed the subject, but each of them seemed to be thinking about it privately as they moved on, hanging out like normal. Max didn’t expect Mike or Dustin to even care that much about her family life, but then again it was probably the most interesting thing for them to think about right now. Nothing life-threatening and scary had happened in a while.

When the bell rang to go back to class, Max hurried ahead of all of them, eager for the next couple hours of classes to wipe Carol’s words from their heads. She heard the “see you later”s of her friends muffled in the pack of kids going to class and pushed around the little cliques of people talking to get to her own math class.

“Wait, Max!”

Max turned around; Mike was close behind her. His class wasn’t in the same hallway so it was weird for him to be there. “Class starts in like three minutes, what?”

He paused, then said under his breath, “Your arm, from earlier this week…. Your stepdad…?”

Shit. _Shit_. “The hand I slammed in a door?” Consistency was one of the most necessary components to lying. Consistency coupled with believability. She’d had believability going for her until now, but if you objectively looked at the evidence it was pretty obvious she was lying. Fortunately, people usually believed your lies because they wanted to. Who wanted to think that their friend’s dad beat them up? God damn, this was so embarrassing. A year ago Mike hadn’t liked her, but he’d never seemed to doubt that she was badass. Crying over her dead brother who’d turned into a monster–that was fine. She wasn’t some machine and she didn’t want or expect her friends to think she was. But getting beaten up by your stepdad was humiliating.

“But did you, or…” Mike glanced around. At least he respected her privacy, sort of. If he really respected it, he’d shut up and go to class. “Like, you said before your stepdad’s an ass, didn’t you?”

Why did she ever even talk, honestly? She was always getting herself into trouble. “Yeah, an ass, but not like that. And that stupid girl only saw him with Billy, anyway. He’s not…as mean to me. Class is literally going to start, Mike. Get a life, seriously.” The halls were beginning to clear out the way they did right before the bell.

“Okay, we can talk about it later.”

“No, get over it-”

Mike was gone. She stalked into class. The day was ruined before it had really begun.

If she had somewhere else to go, Max might have skipped hanging out with her friends after school. She was tired and kind of wanted to be alone. The monotony of the three classes after lunch, even her class with Lucas and Dustin, had dulled the importance of the events earlier in the day. That being said, she wasn’t in a particularly good mood.

They all went first to Mike’s house to drop off their bikes (and Max’s skateboard) because they had to walk up the hill to Dustin’s radio. The walk was long, but they made it frequently enough that they were all used to it. It was not quite 4:30 when they got there.

The settings on the radio were all still where they always were, set to the same channel they always used to call Will and El. It wasn’t really that difficult; the radio could reach all the way to Utah no problem, and Will and El were just in Illinois.

Dustin spoke into the receiver: “Will, do you copy?”

Will was usually there immediately. He waited at his radio for them to call. Today, there was no instant response.

“Will, do you copy?” Dustin tried again.

Not even static.

“Did someone call Will to make sure he could talk today?” Dustin asked, his quizzical expression mirroring theirs.

They all shook their heads. They never called to verify. Will was always there.

“Maybe something came up,” Max suggested. Would nothing go right today? “Maybe he had plans and forgot to say something.”

“Plans with who?” Mike sat down next to Dustin, as if his proximity to the radio might trigger a response from Will. “He had plans with us.”

They waited for five more minutes, Dustin trying again and again with less enthusiasm each time. Obviously, Will wasn’t going to copy.

Dejected, they retreated down the hill, feet thudding against the steep incline. Max half expected the arcade to be closed when they got there, everything else having gone wrong that day. It was open, though, fortunately. She wanted to get lost in Dig Dug, where time went by with little risk of complications.

In the past year, Dustin had attempted and failed many times to beat her high score, which she kept increasing when it was her turn to play. Her arcade quarters were precious, the only money she didn’t put in her savings. Her friends alternated who played what game, while they all gathered around watching. It made their money last longer than if they all played themselves out of money. She and Dustin were by far the best at the majority of games, with Lucas coming in third and Mike last. There was always the chance that Lucas or Mike would top their scores of that day, though, which kept it interesting.

The excitement died down on schedule, about an hour in. But because Will had ghosted them, it was at least half an hour earlier than normal. They made their way out of the arcade, the absence of the recently set sun shrouding them in darkness, and headed back to Mike’s, where their modes of transportation were still stowed.

Back at his garage, they lingered, unsure what to do now. It wasn’t dinnertime yet but they could go hang out in Mike’s basement. Mike seemed to have taken Will’s absence personally, however, and didn’t look very cheery nor inviting. “I think I’m going to go inside,” Mike told them. “I’ll see you tomorrow, I’ll ask Will if he can talk at like noon.” He went back in the house through the garage, leaving the garage door open.

Lucas was gracious enough to say, “I bet you can come over for dinner if you want.” He didn’t say the invitation was explicitly for Max, but Dustin pretty much always went home for dinner if they weren’t at Mike’s for some other reason. Max accepted wholeheartedly.

The Sinclair house was as inviting as the Wheelers’ in the same suburban familial way. Family photos were scattered throughout the house, plus photos of Lucas and his friends at various events. Max was getting to know the layout fairly well, considering she ate at least one dinner there nearly every week. Lucas knew she couldn’t stand to be at home, the reasons why blurry to him but present in some vague truth about Neil being a jerk. Not a violent jerk, just a jerk. In a way, his more complete understanding probably made him less likely to suspect anything than Mike or Dustin, to whom she said little about her family except for the occasional sarcastic remark.

Max thanked them for having her for dinner as she sat down next to Lucas at the table. Erica rolled her eyes at them. “Do you ever go to your _own_ house?” She got some kind of pleasure from making fun of Max and Lucas, like Max cared. She made the same comment at least every other week.

“Do you ever think of new things to say?” Max responded, garnering laughter from Lucas’s parents. Erica stuck out her tongue at Max.

An hour later, Max was getting into Mr. Sinclair’s car with Lucas. It was after seven and pitch black outside, so she’d been talked into being driven home. The car ride was peaceful, streetlights illuminating their path and music playing from the radio at just the right volume. Max sat in the backseat but joined in conversation with Lucas and his dad up at the front.

Lights were on inside Max’s house when Mr. Sinclair slowed his car to a stop in front of it. That wasn’t all: there was the unmistakable sound of shouting coming from inside. Really _loud_ shouting, if it was audible from inside the car. Max cringed in place. Susan and Neil did not fight; this was practically as much uncharted territory for her as for Lucas and his dad. But while it did little for her except heighten her anxiety tenfold, it made Mr. Sinclair twist around in his seat and look back at her, asking perplexedly, “Is something wrong in there?”

Max pretended to not notice, scooping up her backpack and skateboard and easing the door of the car open. “Sounds like the TV,” she shrugged. It sounded approximately nothing like a TV. Lucas made direct eye contact with her and she forced herself to smile. “See you tomorrow.”

He nodded, probably said it back or something. She didn’t know, she had already shut the car door, marching her feet to the door. Adults fought, it didn’t have to mean that much. The Sinclairs probably fought for that matter. Her mother and stepfather were the ones who did not fight, which made this stranger.

Hand on the front door handle, it dawned on her that she should be freaking out right about now. If Susan and Neil had never fought before, this could be bad. She couldn’t make out what they were yelling about inside, but the sounds were mainly coming from a man, clearly Neil. They were heated, full of a rage that wasn’t typical of Neil’s evil yet controlled self. This could be really bad. An image of her mother’s face covered in bruises flashed wildly before Max’s eyes. She pulled her house key from her pocket at a snail’s pace. She was stalling.

Mr. Sinclair’s car was also moving at a snail’s pace, barely finished with its u-turn. Max removed her hand from the door to wave at it, hoping it was too dark and too far away for Lucas or his dad to notice how much her hand was shaking. She turned back to the door, inserted her key into the latch, twisted it slowly. Exhaling, she opened the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Personally this was one of my least favorite chapters to write, I just kind of felt like it was boring in a way idk. I hope you guys enjoyed it because I really don't know if it was any good. I am confident the next chapter(s) will be a lot better because I'm way more excited to write them!
> 
> I'll probably be updating tomorrow again! It works for me to write a chapter a day right now but if I get overloaded with work that might change (I'm not really giving my all to Zoom University rn haha). For now I should continue to update daily.


	5. Danger

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Serious TW for abuse.

The shouting stopped the moment Max stepped inside the house. Neil and Susan were standing in the living room at the very front of the house, which explained why everything had been so loud out in the car. Max set her skateboard down awkwardly, scanning forward to get an idea of what was going on. Thankfully, Susan’s face was injury-free, just scrunched up like she was trying not to cry. She looked upset. Neil looked livid.

Seriously, Max had never seen his face so red in her entire life. He didn’t often lose control; even when he had to be angry, when what he was doing did not make sense coming from someone who wasn’t angry (most of the things he did), he’d never looked like this. He glowered at her, veins on his forehead popping.

“Maxine, the perfect addition to this conversation,” he growled. At least it wasn’t a yell.

If she was the perfect addition to the conversation, then it had to have been about her. It made sense given how angry he was and how much it seemed like he hated her, but it didn’t make sense given that she wasn’t under the impression her mother and Neil ever talked about her. Well, they talked about her, but they didn’t fight about her. Neil said what he wanted to say and Susan went along with it.

Max didn’t speak. She wasn’t sure she could. She felt sick with fear, like throw-up sick. She could get through anything by assuring herself that it would be over soon, it would go away. But Neil’s face, how angry he was…it might be over in a little while, but she was ashamed of how terrified she was _right now_. She’d had a nice time with Lucas, she’d had dinner with his family. Of course Neil would destroy that. It wasn’t fair.

“Why don’t you tell your mother,” Neil hissed, feet stepping forward, hand in a loose fist, “that my discipline of you is not too rough. She seems to have the crazy idea that I go too far. Even though I raised my son like this until he was eighteen, and it was the only way to teach him respect.”

Max felt her jaw drop slightly. She could not believe her mother said that to Neil. No, she literally couldn’t believe it; her mind was unable to process this information, other than that its foreignness was so extreme she might wake up any minute from a dream.

“Are you going to tell her, Maxine?” Neil’s voice was elevating, getting closer to the yell she’d heard through the door. He was practically to her, not reaching for her but not relaxing his hand. As he came towards her, Susan was backing away in the other direction.

Max still could not answer. She didn’t know what to answer. There was a right answer and a wrong answer, and the wrong answer was the right answer. _Yes, I know it’s just discipline, I know it’s not that bad, please let me go to my room, I’m sorry._ She couldn’t get it to come out.

“You think what I do is abuse or some shit? You wouldn’t know abuse if it looked you in the face!” Neil roared. Maybe the neighbors would hear. _Don’t let them hear_. Or was it better for them to hear? What if he killed her? “You want to know what abuse is like? You want to know what your mother seems to think I do to you?”

No, she didn’t. There were tears on Max’s cheeks that she couldn’t remember shedding. He was so close to her that she was pressed into the wall to avoid touching him.

His hand still hovered, then he was yelling again: “THIS. IS. WHAT. IT’S. ACTUALLY. LIKE.” With every word, his hand came down on her. There was no control to it, no specific intention like there usually was. She couldn’t see, her eye was searing with pain, her cheek caught on her teeth and she was accidentally biting her tongue causing more pain, pain everywhere. She was sitting down, pulling her legs to her to keep him from punching her stomach. Then he kicked her, his brown leather work shoe colliding with her hip, once then twice. He grabbed her shoulders and threw her against the opposite wall. Maybe he was still yelling, maybe he had stopped. She wasn’t sure, she was distracted by the ringing in her own ears. She thought he might be approaching her again, but then…

Ringing. Real ringing. The telephone.

Through her blurry vision Max saw Neil’s head snap around, facing the telephone that hung on the wall a little ways away. Susan’s shape was semi-visible somewhere in that direction, too, but Neil marched across the room with surprising speed, tearing the phone off the hook.

“Hargrove residence, Neil speaking.” Max might be imagining his eyes jump to her, but she didn’t think so. Her vision was clearing up a bit, though everything felt extremely foggy. She reached up to touch her face and her saw blood on her hand as she pulled it away.

The ringing in her ears still uncomfortably noisy, Max couldn’t really make out what Neil was saying into the phone. It was something like “she’s busy, she can’t talk right now.” He was using his fake polite voice, but poorly, like his heart wasn’t in it. He was definitely staring at her, every moment he spent on the telephone his eyes squinting closer together.

Then, unprecedented, Neil lowered the phone and held his hand against the receiver. “Some boy is on the phone, Maxine. _Insists_ he talk to you. Tell him you’re fine, and to go away. Understand?” He spoke softly, but Max understood every word. Lucas. It had to be.

She found herself taking the receiver from Neil, struggling to hold onto it with the cord stretched so far, speaking despite genuinely believing herself incapable of doing so. “Hi?”

Yes, it was Lucas. He was talking at a normal noise level but he sounded so incredibly loud that it hurt her ears. “Max? I’ve been trying to get you on the radio but you weren’t answering. Are you okay?”

Even if she went insane and told Lucas she wasn’t okay and she was currently afraid her stepdad had broken some part of her body, it wouldn’t save her. One wrong word and Neil would kill her before anyone could do anything about it. She was not insane. Even like this, huddled in the corner barely able to hold onto the telephone, she was not insane.

“Yeah, Lucas, everything’s fine.” She didn’t sound normal, she was aware of it. It was hard when she was attempting to conceal the fact that she was crying.

“Are you sure, because-”

“Yeah, no, I’m sure,” she choked out. Neil was kneeling across from Max, eyes boring into hers. She had to get rid of Lucas. “I’m…doing stuff…right now…I should go because-”

“Max, are you lying?” He was worried. He was talking quieter, as if he suspected someone might be listening, which someone was. “If you need help, or something, say, uhhh, ‘I have math homework.’”

What? Was he a 911 dispatcher now? Neil was still making eye contact with her. She didn’t know if he could hear what Lucas was saying or not, but every second of it appearing like she’d complained about Neil to one of her friends was not helping anything.

“No, Lucas, I’m fine, just busy.” Her throat hurt. Neil’s hand was reaching for the phone, about to take it away from her. “I have to go, I’ll see you later, goodbye-”

Max didn’t know what Lucas replied because Neil hung up the phone.

The room was spinning. She shut her eyes.

“We do not talk to other people about what goes on in this family.” Neil was surprisingly calm. He was close to her, she sensed it, but she kept her eyes shut. “We talk to each other. And when it comes to how I treat you, you trust that I know what I’m doing.”

Max was nodding dizzily. Anything, she would do anything to be able to go to her room and lock the door. If that was agreeing to everything he said, so be it.

“How old are you, Maxine?”

She opened her eyes a crack. The room was still spinning. Neil was looking at her like she was a puppy who’d bitten him.

“You are fourteen. I’m the adult. So from now on, what I say goes. Your mother could stand to learn that, too.”

She was aware of him leaving, his work shoes drumming a distinct rhythm on the floor. She stayed there on the floor until her breath was steadier and she was slightly less dizzy, then she used her hands to push herself up to a standing position. She had been hit many times before, shoved into walls and pinched and slapped. But she had never hurt in so many places at once, so intensely. She didn’t want to deal with this. She didn’t want to ice her face, think of explanations to tell her friends when she half knew her secret was close to over anyway.

At some point, Max managed to get to her room, her feet ready to collapse underneath her. She climbed onto her bed, wincing. It took all her strength to kick her shoes off her feet and pull herself to the headboard, sinking down into her pillows. She felt like she had run a marathon. She was so tired she could barely keep her eyes open. Tears kept coming endlessly, like they knew she had no energy to truly cry so they were taking on a mind of their own.

She had to wash her face. She had to ice her eye before it turned black for an entire week.

She was drifting off to sleep, the urge overtaking her power to fight it off.

Her bedroom doorknob was turning. She had forgotten to lock it. The realization jolted her up, flat against her pillows, a wave of nausea coursing through her from the abrupt movement.

It wasn’t Neil, but Susan. Her face crumpled at the sight of Max. She tiptoed into the room and carefully shut the door, like she didn’t want to wake the gods. Max would’ve thought this cautiousness was to hide Susan’s presence from Neil, but it wasn’t even eight o’clock and there was no way he was asleep; he had to know she was in there.

“Max, oh my god, honey, I’m sorry.” Unexpected.

Susan closed the gap between her and her daughter, seating herself at the very edge of the bed. Her entire body was shaking, whether from grief or fear Max didn’t know. “Max, I didn’t know he’d do this to you. I don’t think he meant to, that’s not an excuse but-”

“How could he not mean to?” It was still painful to talk, and Max thought she sounded a little like Eleven, halted. But really, how was her bleeding face any sort of accident?

“I mean, you know…he was mad because I told him his discipline was too harsh, he wanted to prove it’s not the same as what other people do.” Max knew her mother was not dumb enough to listen to herself saying those words and think they were reasonable. The shakiness was from fear for sure. Susan was as scared of Neil as she was. Was this was _she_ was like, playing into his wishes, refusing to admit to anyone that anything was wrong? They were both so powerless that Max wanted to shriek.

“He won’t do this again,” Susan continued, grabbing for Max’s hand. “He said he’s sorry, it was just a lesson, he knows this isn’t right…it’s going to be okay.”

Maybe that was true. After all, he’d never hurt her this badly before. Tonight was different. It might not happen again like this. She didn’t have the mental capacity to distinguish between the delusions her mind fed her and what might be objective reality.

“He told me to make sure you know that…” Susan hesitated. “To make sure you know that telling people about this stuff is wrong. They don’t get it, if they misunderstand they might take you away from us. From me.”

Max was crying, not able to restrain herself anymore, not caring to. “Mom, I’ve never told anyone, I’m not stupid,” she sobbed. “But you know this isn’t right, I know you’re afraid of him, but you know he goes too far, you _told_ him he does.” She whispered the second half, paranoid that Neil was listening.

Susan wrapped her arms around Max, her breathing scarily erratic. The gesture was odd; it would have been comforting if the knowledge that it would probably not happen again for a long time wasn’t at the top of Max’s mind. Susan whispered, too: “I thought it was too far, but _this_ , this is too far. What can we do, honey?”

Susan was pulling out of the hug already, a dark look having overtaken her eyes. She slid back across the sheets and stood up. Despite herself, Max reached forward, craving one last hug, one last acknowledgment of her suffering, but it wasn’t reciprocated. Susan was gone before Max could situate herself back onto her pillows.

So that was that. Because this was worse, because Neil could get _really_ angry, _really_ violent, she had to settle for the normal version of him until the end of time. Of course she did. She had. She hated it, but she had settled for it after maybe the tenth time she’d felt his hands against her. She’d grown numb to it, full of hatred and fear but used to it. Tonight had reawakened the intensity of those feelings, reawakened the truth about what the future held, again and again and again and again.

There was nothing to be done. Whatever bullshit Neil said to save his own ass, he was right that if she told anyone she would get taken away to some foster home, away from her mother. Hell, for all she knew foster parents were just as bad. At least right now she had friends. And who was even to say she would get taken away? Not like she wanted to, but if she told and was forced to stay in the house, Neil would probably end her life. He wasn’t a murderer, but neither was Billy, and Billy had practically killed Steve last year with his own fists. Neil wasn’t as strong, but he was more heartless.

Max’s radio caught her eye, positioned on the floor partway under her bed beside her piggy bank. She inched across her bed until she was close enough to touch it with her foot, sliding it closer until she could grab onto it.

She noticed the antenna was pushed in, off. No wonder she hadn’t heard anything from Lucas since the telephone call. Thank goodness; if Neil had heard the radio before, he might have confiscated it.

She weighed her options. If she didn’t reach out to Lucas, he might think she was dead. If she did, she’d have to say something, and she didn’t know what to say. The jig was close to up, even if she refused to admit it; she couldn’t go over to Mike’s tomorrow with her face smashed in, and her absence might be the final straw in the metaphorical alarm bells of her friends.

If it got back to Neil that her friends knew about any of this, she was screwed. She was screwed however she looked at it. She had to handle this.

She pulled the antenna out, fingers trembling. She pressed in the talk button and whispered hoarsely, “Lucas, you there? Do you copy?”

His response was instant. “Holy shit, Max. I’ve been trying to reach you-”

“I know, you said. On the call. Uh, can you be a little quieter?” She wasn’t one hundred percent sure how loud he was; there was still a tinny ringing in her ears. “My radio was turned off. Over.” That was true.

“But after I called you-”

She didn’t let him finish. “I said I was busy. I’m sorry. Over.”

There was static before he spoke, his breathing mixed in with it. “Yeah, but then you just cut off. You sounded so weird. You still sound weird.” He didn’t talk like that very often, so hushed. Granted, he was probably hushed because she told him to be quiet, but still. She wasn’t handling this very well after all. “I know they were fighting, Max, even my dad knew it wasn’t the TV. Over.”

As much truth as possible was the best form of lying. “Yeah, they were fighting, but they stopped. It’s not a big deal. I was busy with homework. Over.” The pain in her side where Neil had kicked her was stabbing. She shifted her position on the bed.

“You promise he didn’t hurt you? Over.”

“Come on, you don’t believe that stupid shit from earlier today.” Bitterness filled her words. She hoped it resembled sarcasm. “Over.”

“You sound so weird, Max…” Was it desperation in his voice? God damn this. “Just say you promise. Please just say you promise. Over.”

No. Not promise. Friends don’t lie. A promise is something you don’t break. _Bullshit_. When Susan had married Neil, she’d promised this would make their family more whole. It was all bullshit.

“I promise.” She was going to hell. She didn’t deserve to be in the Party. “I should go, I’m tired. Lucas?”

“Yeah?”

Tears had found their way into her eyes yet again. “I love you.” She sounded far away. “Over.”

“I love you too!” She’d made him happier, if only a tiny bit. “Max-”

“Gotta go. Over and out.” She shoved the antenna back into the radio and threw it to the end of the bed. She slid herself down and padded across the room to the mirror, wincing at the sight. A gigantic bruise, much larger than any ordinary black eye, had formed across the whole the left side of her face. Her lip was split open and swelling by the minute, blood hardened on her chin. She raised her sweatshirt slowly, staring at the dull, purplish hue of another gigantic bruise over her left hip all the way up to her ribs. As she lowered the sweatshirt, her shoulder twisted in pain. She pulled the neck over her shoulder, another bruise clearly visible, isolated; she recalled vaguely Neil’s fist coming down onto it from above.

There were probably more bruises, but it didn’t matter. She had big sweatshirts and aspirin. The problem was her face. It wouldn’t be healed by Monday, no way. She couldn’t stay in this house until it did. Anxiety fluttered through her at the concept. The lock on her bedroom door wasn’t enough to keep her safe.

The lock, probably smart. She crossed over to the door, pressing the lock in with her thumb, no click sound resonating at all. She’d gotten good at that; Neil had once heard her locking it and lectured her about shutting out her family. That was before Billy died, and Neil had just snapped at her. She’d been so naive to be upset about that.

Her legs wavering, she slipped down onto the floor, spotting her street car piggy bank.

The obvious answer.

She had friends here. She’d miss them. She’d miss them so badly, the thought destroyed her. If she was going to leave them, it didn’t have to be like this. But this way, there was no chance of Neil confessing their family secrets. There was no humiliation of people discovering that Mad Max cowered into the corner of her own house, crying, a victim. This way, she was in control.

It didn’t often work out when people tried to save other people. Billy saved Eleven, and he was gone. Saving yourself was always, always better. She could save herself. She had the money.

_Almost_. Shit. She almost had the money. Neil. The ten dollars. She needed more money. Where was she going to get more money? Not from Lucas, not from any of her friends; not with her face fucked up, not without a five paragraph reason. Every possible option was a weak one. Even if she was willing to steal, she didn’t know how to steal. If she got thrown in juvie or something, Neil would be furious. Who did she know who had enough money that ten dollars wasn’t a fortune? That she could convince to lend it to her?

Steve.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter made me honestly sad to write by the end of it. I don't know what else to say about it, I didn't know going into this story how intense it was going to become or how invested I'd be in my own story.
> 
> As I always seem to say, I will be updating tomorrow! Off to complete all my math homework before 11:59pm...


	6. Steve

**November 9, 1985**

Max awoke to the reverberation of her alarm clock. For a moment she laid there, out of it, then memories of the night before came to her and she clapped her hand on the top of her alarm clock, silencing it before it could ring again and awaken the rest of the house.

Last night, she’d elected to go to bed and wake up early in the morning rather than try to do anything in the black of the night, when she was unable to walk without getting sick to her stomach. She’d hoped sleep would help, but it hadn’t. An unwavering sense of _wrongness_ was all she could describe the way she felt, lying in bed: a dull ache somehow combined with sharpness, everywhere.

She drew herself up, not allowing herself to indulge in any urge to go back to sleep. The red numbers of the clock blinked at her, telling her it was 7:02AM.

She thought she had come up with some type of plan last night before drifting off to sleep, but her head was hopelessly empty now. Instead, thoughts of how ridiculous this was filled it. Yes, she’d been saving for a bus ticket for months, some kind of Plan F that comforted her. But she’d never _actually_ believed she might use the money for a bus ticket. The plan was always to go to Los Angeles, get her dad to fix everything. He couldn’t possibly ignore her if she were there in person, like he did her calls half the time. But she didn’t even know if there were bus tickets from Indianapolis to Los Angeles. She didn’t want to hitchhike to Indianapolis, either. El had hitchhiked before, sure, but El had superpowers. Max wasn’t even a fully intact person right now.

Max’s stomach lurched as she stood. What else was she going to do, really? The bus ticket money had always been for the mystical time when future Max couldn’t take this anymore. Guilt flooded her. Billy took this for years, his entire life. She could take more if he did. Was it immature to run away? Last night she’d been totally confident that running away was how she was going to save herself. Today, she felt stupid for needing to save herself at all.

But it wasn’t like this was going to go away if she left it alone. Her friends were suspicious, and right now there was unequivocal physical evidence that something was wrong. Like it or not, away was the only place to go.

Max set to work, gathering a few items of clothing, a toothbrush, and her still-off radio. Best to travel light; for all she knew someone would try to rob her. Her backpack was still in the front of the house with her skateboard, but she wasn’t chancing getting either of those things until she was completely ready to go.

She’d fallen asleep in her jeans so she left those on but changed out of her t-shirt and hoodie into a long sleeved shirt and a much baggier hoodie. She fished around in her closet for one of her warmer jackets and put it with her pile of things to bring. On her bedside table sat a bottle of aspirin, still there from earlier that week. She poured three pills into her hand and dry swallowed them, tossing the bottle at the pile as well. For the second time in twenty-four hours, she crossed the room to study herself in the mirror, wincing. Yeah, she wasn’t going anywhere looking like this.

The box of makeup on Max’s dresser had been brought in by her mother nearly a year ago, with the hope that Max might want to wear it to the SnowBall. She had not, but the box had remained there for whatever reason, collecting dust. Max wiped off some of the dust with her sleeve and removed the lid, lifting out containers of foundation, concealer, and lipstick. She put the lipstick back but carried the other two over to the mirror. She had never done makeup like this before; the few times she’d worn it of her own volition, she’d just put on lip gloss and blush. It couldn’t be that difficult.

She started with the foundation, refusing to worry about the fact that it was probably a year and a half old and might not be the best to use. She rubbed it all over her face with her fingers, concentrating on the bruising on the left side of her face. Progress, but not all the way there. She took the concealer next, dabbing it all over the bruising. Oops, maybe that was too much. As she smoothed it in, clenching her teeth at the pressure on the bruise, it looked overly thick and goopy. Gross. It worked, though; the black and purple was gone. So were her freckles, making her look weird in a different way, but she’d have to suck it up.

Her split lip, unfortunately, remained. There was no lip-colored concealer, and red lipstick would just call attention to the makeup. Oh well, she would just have to cover her lip with a lie. It was better than trying to explain why her entire face was smashed in. She shut both containers of makeup and set them with the stuff she was taking.

Last was her money. She crouched down next to her bed and carefully opened her piggy bank, tugging out all of the bills: one hundred thirty-three dollars. She had read once that the average price for a long distance bus ride was $150. Average was a vague term, but no way a bus ticket to LA was cheaper than $150. There was no denying that she needed more. She folded all the bills over each other and dropped them into her shoe, an old trick her dad had taught her. Then she put her foot in after it, lacing up both her shoes once they were on her feet.

A cursory glance around her room confirmed there was nothing left to do, that it was time. Swallowing down the lump in her throat, she wrapped her arms around the pile of items and walked with trepidation to the door, slipping out.

Max cleared the distance between her bedroom and the front door in about three seconds. Moving like a Demodog was on her tail, she seized her backpack, emptied its contents onto the floor, undid the latch on the front door, and stumbled out onto the porch, kicking her skateboard along with her. Hastily, she stuffed everything she’d been carrying into the bag and zipped it shut, hoisting it onto her back.

Was this the last time she’d ever see her house? It seemed impossible. Not looking back, she stepped onto her skateboard and kicked off.

The Harringtons’ driveway was empty except for Steve’s car. Max questioned if maybe she was making a mistake. She might be wearing makeup, but she was shaky and uneasy, and begging to borrow money from anybody was risky at the best of times. _There are no other options, get over yourself and do it._

She found the doorbell to the right of the door. Though she’d been to the Harringtons a few times, her friends mainly hung out with Steve at the video store. The times they had come over, he’d been expecting them.

He was definitely not expecting her.

Getting up so early had a dual purpose, the first being to avoid Neil, the second being that Steve usually worked early on Saturdays and would most certainly be up. It didn’t seem like he was up, however. She waited there for nearly a minute with no suggestion of his presence on the other side of the door, wondering if she should turn around and go. Just when she was about to, the door swung open, Steve standing there in jeans and a white undershirt, bleary-eyed.

“The hell you doing here this early? I don’t even think the damn birds are awake yet.”

“Don’t you have a job?” It was after 7:30 so she really didn’t feel that bad about waking him up.

“Keith wanted more hours, decided to cover my shift…” He ran his fingers through his hair, a quizzical expression on his face. “Do you, like, need something?” His eyes traveled to her bulging backpack, then to her mouth, one side of her lip swollen.

She smiled. “Yeahhh, uh, weird question, normally I wouldn’t ask or anything, especially since you clearly wish you could still be asleep even though it’s literally morning-”

“Do you have a point, kid?” He made a face at her. “And what’s with your lip? Did somebody deck you?”

She tucked her hair behind her ear, mimicking an air of nonchalance. “I got in a fight yesterday, you should see the other guy. It’s seriously not important. My point is, could I maybe…borrow twenty dollars?”

“ _Twenty_ dollars. Um, no? And you got in a _fight_?”

“Steve, your job isn’t even because you need money, you know you have it to lend me.” She was probably never going to get the chance to pay him back, which made her a bad person. What else was new.

He stepped back into his house and gestured for her to come inside, shutting the front door behind her. “Can I ask what this twenty dollars you so desperately need is _for_?”

 _No, Steve, you can’t_. She pursed her lips sheepishly. “It’s a surprise.” She nodded enthusiastically like she was agreeing with herself. “It would spoil it to tell you.”

“Mmhmm, likely story,” he responded, rolling his eyes. “So what’s your plan for paying me back, you got some sort of a contract drawn up?”

“I’ll pay you back soon,” she vowed. She was a bad person, god.

Steve nodded sarcastically, then, taking notice of something, leaned forward abruptly, startling her. “Hang on, are you wearing makeup?” He said it like it was hands down the most surprising part of anything she had said or done since coming there. She should probably be offended, but the offensiveness or lack thereof of the comment was not what bothered her, it was his noticing at all.

He widened his eyes. “Do you want my money to go buy more makeup, because-”

“No!” She exclaimed, scandalized. “I said it’s a surprise, Jesus. Can I have it or not?”

Steve was contemplating it. Finally, he turned around and headed to the kitchen, her following. He picked up a wallet off the counter and removed four fives in slow succession. He pulled open the middle of the wallet and held it facing her, showing her that it was now empty. “That’s all the cash I carry, so you better have a good reason.”

She snatched it from him before he could change his mind, relief pouring through her at her plan being executed successfully. Time for the way harder part. A thought struck her then, her at first batting it away but her nervousness at hitchhiking causing it to seem more and more viable.

“Could I ask for one more favor?” She grinned with her teeth like she was making an effort to play nice.

“Depends on the favor. You can’t have twenty more dollars if that’s what-”

“No, something else.” She bit her lip, but winced when her teeth pierced the hole already in it.

“Okay wait, tell me more about this fight first.” He leaned in again, looking at her lip. “Who were you even fighting?”

“Some…kid.” She shrugged exaggeratedly. “You wouldn’t know him, he’s a freshman, new to Hawkins, actually.”

Steve gave her a weird look. “Let me get this straight: you got into a fight with some random kid and now you need money.”

“The two are unrelated,” Max hastened to assure him. “Thanks for the money, I can let you go back to bed.”

His weird look intensified. “You said you wanted another favor.”

She had, but now it was going to sound hopelessly strange. She guessed it couldn’t really hurt to ask, though. “Well, since you’re not working, you probably have no plans…”

“That is rude and not _true_ , but go on.”

“How would you like to be my chauffeur to Indianapolis?”

His brow furrowed, completely caught off guard. “You want me to drive you an hour and a half away? I’m guessing you have a reason for this, too, that you’re not going to tell me.”

She gave him the same angelic look she’d given the pool staff last summer when she told them she’d return Heather’s jacket. “It’s a surprise, too. What do you say?”

“How long are you going to be there? I’m supposed to sit around in a car while you do god know’s what in Indianapolis?”

“Oh, you can just drop me off.” She held her relaxed look on her face. It was key. “Um, my mom can pick me up.”

Steve stared at her like she was crazy. “That kid you fought knock your head in? Is all that makeup to hide some giant bump or something?”

She froze temporarily, processing that he was kidding and re-conjuring her poker face a moment too late.

“Wait, I wasn’t serious, what the hell.” For a third time, he bent forward, searching her caky makeup-covered face for evidence of his claim. She held her breath, tensely imagining what her own face had looked like in the mirror half an hour earlier. “You want to tell me more about this fight of yours? Jesus Christ, kid.”

“No, this kid didn’t even fight back, the makeup was for fun.” Steve raised his eyebrows at her and she raised hers back, challenging him. “I’m not crazy, I just have a big surprise planned and you’re _ruining_ it. Are you going to drive me, or not? It’s a simple question.”

Steve leaned back against the counter, sighing. “What are you going to do if I don’t drive you?”

She shrugged. “According to El, hitchhiking isn’t that hard.” Her eyes sparkled.

“Uh, that is not happening.”

The phone rang then. Max jumped at the noise, thinking of the night before. She hoped Steve wouldn’t bother answering it, but he held up his finger to signal for her to wait a minute and walked into the dining room to pick it up. She shifted her weight back and forth between her feet, anxious.

“Hi, Dustin,” Steve said into the phone, loud enough for her to hear clearly.

Uh oh.

“Look for her? What?…No, Dustin, she’s-….She literally standing in my kitchen, why are you looking for her?…Why wouldn’t she be, what the hell?… _Sorry_ , yeah, no, she’s fine…Except for what that kid did to her face yesterday or whatever…”

Max wondered if she should leave. There was probably little chance of her being driven to Indianapolis now, anyway, so she should probably make her escape. She felt frozen, though, rooted to her spot.

“…You don’t know about the fight?…Hell, Dustin, I don’t know…What, you expect me to stop her if she wants to-…Okay, calm down, I won’t, god…”

The call was over; Max heard the click of the phone on the wall, Steve returning to the kitchen. He was staring at her, really staring at her, harder than before.

She hurried to be the first to speak. “What was that about?”

“Why don’t you we start with who _actually_ hit you?” He was serious. She should’ve left.

 _Change the subject_. “What did Dustin want?”

Steve’s hand was in his hair again. He looked at her sideways. “He wanted me to make sure you don’t leave.”

Panic surged through Max and she wildly envisioned Steve locking the door or restraining her. She took two steps back, expression faltering. “Okay…”

“I’m not going to lock you up or something, kid,” Steve said, reading her mind. “But _anyway_ , he also said you didn’t get in a fight, which takes me back to my original question.”

“Well, I didn’t tell Dustin about the fight. I’m badass enough as it is,” she added sarcastically.

“Yeah, nope, sorry, not buying it. I’m going to take my money back if you don’t tell me.”

Max curled her fingers around the precious twenty dollars, shaking her head. “Can’t take back what you already gave me.”

“Yeah? You want to try me?”

He reached for her wrist to remove the money from her hand, but she pulled back like he’d burned her, her face reddening. He frowned at her, plainly concerned. “Shit, Max, just tell me who hit you. Dustin said something about your family, I don’t know. I wasn’t born yesterday, I’m not going to buy it until you tell me something other than it happened in some fake fight.”

Her ability to be sarcastic in this situation was fading away. She felt exposed. “Fine, it wasn’t a fight.”

“No shit, _and_ …?”

“And if you’re not going to drive me to Indianapolis, I’m going to leave.”

She spun on the balls of her feet, marching back through the house to the front door. Before she was all the way there, Steve caught her by the shoulders, stopping her. She flinched, a combination of surprise and pain at the contact with her heavily bruised shoulder.

“You keep jumping like that and you’re gonna make me think something’s seriously wrong,” Steve told her, immediately releasing his hold on her shoulders but the concern on his face tripling.

She didn’t respond, rolling her eyes and turning back around. He didn’t stop her from opening the door and walking out, but she could practically hear his mind whirring with questions. She dropped her skateboard wheels-down on the ground and snuck a glance back at him.

“Hey, this isn’t over,” he insisted, hands on his hips.

It was, though, for her. She stuffed the twenty dollars into her jeans pocket and took off. She knew he wouldn’t chase after her, no matter how badly he wanted to, but her bridges were burned. She had to get out of Hawkins.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm normally fast at writing things but the chapters of this story are taking disproportionately long for me to write because I'm trying so hard to fit each line to the character. I literally like imagine them saying it and if I can't then I change it. You know you have no life in this pandemic when you have time to spend hours on a 3,000 word chapter because you have to verify each word sounds like them haha. I really hope you guys agree that the dialogue is realistic because I'm putting my blood sweat and tears into it :D JK but I have issues.
> 
> Minor note: I spent like ten minutes researching the prices of bus tickets and came up with almost nothing so forgive me if my pricing is wildly inaccurate (in the next chapter too)! I tried! Also, I literally use the inflation calculator on all the money amounts I write so Max's money is like the equivalent of $320 if you're curious.


	7. The Lost Max

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I could not resist with the title because I realized this is the seventh chapter of the story and The Lost Sister was the seventh episode of Season 2 haha! I feel like this chapter is very similar to that episode including in that it might not be as enjoyable to read in all parts because it's just Max and not the other characters (I'm definitely one of the people who found that episode pretty boring). I empathize more with the writers now, though, because this was literally so much fun to write. I wouldn't say it's a filler chapter because it's super key to the plot but don't worry, I promise it's the only chapter in the story like this.

Max didn’t know how she had convinced herself of this. Less than an hour ago she’d thought it seemed impossible that she wouldn’t see her house again. She’d been way more right than she could’ve anticipated.

Standing there, rolling her skateboard back and forth under her foot to calm her nerves, she reminded herself that the house itself wasn’t inherently dangerous. She’d spent many of the days in the last four months there safely. She couldn’t even pinpoint what she was scared of; yes, Neil was scary, but she’d never felt this scared to go home. _You’re not going home_ , she echoed to herself, _you’re just being smart_.

Legs like rubber, she climbed the front steps and knocked lightly on the door. As she’d expected and hoped, it was her mother who came, gasping at the sight of her. Max held a finger to her lips, praying her mother would by some miracle cooperate with her, and pulled her by the hand out onto the porch.

“Mom, I know you’re confused why I’m not inside, but I have a huge favor to ask you, and it would mean a lot to me if you did it because I don’t usually ask you to do things and…” she was rambling. She took a breath, attempting to decipher her mother’s facial expression.

“I thought you were still in bed,” Susan whispered. She was primarily focused on the backpack, Max thought. “Your face looks so much better, what did you-”

“Makeup.” Max made herself smile, knowing this might encourage her mother. “I thought it would keep people from, you know, misunderstanding. I just have one thing to ask you, I swear.”

Susan’s eyes remained fixated on the backpack. “Are you going somewhere?” Panic-stricken wasn’t too strong of a description for her voice.

 _Here goes_. “Yeah, Lucas invited me to go with him and our other friends to this movie in Indianapolis. But I didn’t get the message because of last night, and they left really early, but…if you drove me there, I could still make it.”

Her mother’s expression was easily decipherable now: _what in the world, Max?_ But there was something else, consideration. And relief. She was evidently relieved that Max was just going to a movie. “I don’t know if I should just take off and leave with you. You’re sure there’s a plan to see the movie there?”

“Positive. And Lucas’s mom will bring me home. It will make me feel so much better, Mom.” Even at a whisper, she was pleading.

The wheels were turning in Susan’s head. She let out a sigh. “Okay, fine. I get it. Go wait at the car, I’ll come in a second.”

In other words, she was not going to tell Neil what she was doing. All right with Max.

A million things could have gone wrong from that point, but just a couple minutes later Susan was coming down the front steps with cars keys in hand. Max smiled, for once completely and truly thankful for something her mother had done.

When the door was unlocked, Max started to load her skateboard in with her, but Susan gave her a confused look. “You don’t need your skateboard at the movies, Max, just leave it on the driveway.”

Right. Max felt like she was saying goodbye to a friend as she set the skateboard down on the edge of the driveway. It hit her what she was doing, but there was no way out now even if she wanted to find one. She’d get a new skateboard in LA, if she managed to get there.

Susan tried to make small talk during the drive, clearly indulging in one of the rare moments she’d spent with Max as of late. Max was too anxious to really cherish it, as well as too sad; she didn’t want to think that this was the last moment she’d have with her mother. She didn’t want to think about any of that stuff, the real stuff. She had one goal and the consequences were too big and messy to control. Best not think about them at all.

Rain started falling at some point, heavy taps on the roof of the car, little fish swimming down Max’s passenger-side window. It was soothing if Max ignored that she was going to be out in it soon, fending for herself. By this point Susan had stopped talking, so the rain provided a more comfortable aspect to the silence.

Eventually, right about when the signs on the highway started saying Indianapolis was close, Susan spoke: “Where is the movie theater exactly, do you know?”

Honestly, Max had expected that her mother would know of one singular movie theater in Indianapolis and take her there, and Max would have to find her own way to the bus station. She could use this to her advantage. “Um, Lucas said I could meet them at a McDonalds, the theater’s hard to find.” She strained her mind, mentally flipping through images of the Thomas Guide she’d nearly committed to memory a month ago, while searching for the bus station. She remembered the McDonalds, super close to the station, then she remembered that her mother had a Thomas Guide in the car and she was being dumb. “I’ll find it, hang on.”

She opened the glove compartment and pulled out the Thomas Guide, tons of little maps and pages spilling out of it. Locating the highway on the map, Max ran her finger along it while her eyes searched for the bus station, then the McDonalds. “It’s on Seventh Street,” she offered. “I think you get off at the next exit, then just go right.” She was no expert at reading maps. This was totally crazy, literally directing her mother to drive her to where she’d soon disappear from. If Billy were still here, even he might be impressed with her ingenuity. Other people would be more freaked out than impressed, but whatever. This was the very definition of taking things into her own hands.

Seven minutes later, Susan was parked at the McDonalds. It was only ten o’clock in the morning, so it wasn’t busy. Max spotted a few families inside, eating Egg McMuffins and enjoying their Saturday mornings.

“I don’t see your friends,” Susan said, scanning the property from her seat in the car. “Are you sure this is the place?”

Max nodded then stopped herself, the shaking triggering an awful headache. The aspirin was wearing off. “Lucas said Mrs. Sinclair was going to take them around the area, but I could radio him when I got here. I’ve got it in here.” She patted her backpack, which had ridden on the floor between her legs. “I should go, Mom.”

Susan turned her head towards Max. Max was alarmed, albeit not terribly surprised, to see tears glistening in her eyes. “Have fun with your friends,” she said slowly. “I’ll see you tonight?”

“Oh, umm, I might sleep over at Lucas’s. On the couch. Is that okay?” The more time she had to get far away, the better.

Susan smiled, dabbing at her eyes. “Just call to let me know if anything changes, honey.”

“I will.” Max hesitated, about to open the car door. “I- Are you okay?”

Susan patted Max’s shoulder then quickly withdrew her hand, as if fearing she’d hurt her. She didn’t exactly answer the question, but instead held the smile on her face, saying, “Neil’s sorry about what he did.”

Max inhaled. “Yeah,” was all she said back, getting out of the car. She gave a halfhearted wave through the window as her mother reversed and drove away.

Here she was, alone in the city, running away.

The rain drenched Max before she got to the bus station; the walk had looked a lot shorter on the map, but in real life it was almost ten minutes, straight down the same street. It had been a while since she’d been in a city, and the sheer number of people every which way was unsettling somehow.

Max had picture the bus station to be bigger than it was. Ticket counters faced out, like at the movie theater. There was a glass door into the station, but through it she saw that it was merely a large room full of seats. Fortunately, she spotted a bathroom inside, and headed there, stopping to take a drink at the water fountain. Inside the stall, she slid off her shoe and pulled out her money, moving it to her pocket where the twenty dollars from Steve resided. Her father had always hammered in that the key to hiding your money in your shoe was to not let anyone know it was there; if you took your shoe off in public to get to your money, it defeated the whole purpose. Her insides filled with butterflies, remembering that if all went well she’d be seeing her dad soon.

Exiting the waiting area of the bus station, Max approached one of the ticket counters. A woman was working at the counter, looking tired. She didn’t even attempt to act friendly towards Max, only elevating her eyes slightly. “What can I do for you?”

“I want a ticket to Los Angeles.” Despite knowing that people came here every day to buy tickets to random places, she cringed as she said it. Was it illegal to run away from home? Probably. If anyone wanted to stop her, they must be able to.

“Okay, one second.” The woman had a thick binder in front of her and she started palming through it, stopping at a page about halfway through. “The next bus to Los Angeles leaves at nine o’clock in the morning.”

Confused, Max asked, “What time is it now?”

“Just after ten.”

“What? But you said-”

“My apologies, I meant it leaves _tomorrow_ at nine o’clock in the morning.”

A chill ran down Max’s spine. The woman didn’t even look remotely apologetic. She couldn’t possibly stay here for nearly twenty-four hours. She’d been stupid to tell Steve she was going to Indianapolis, and now it wasn’t unreasonable to think someone might come looking for her here if they figured out she’d bolted. She couldn’t be a sitting duck in that bus station all day and all night. She needed a new plan.

“Um, what buses leave next?” The sleepover she’d had with El in September, when El had recounted the story of her trip to Chicago, filled her mind. But Chicago wasn’t really on the way to LA, and going there would be a waste of time and money. “What about to St. Louis?” She thought St. Louis was kind of on the way, if her minimal knowledge of geography was accurate.

The woman glanced at her curiously but flipped through the binder again. “The next bus to St. Louis leaves at 12:15.”

12:15. Not horrible. She’d only have to kill two hours here. Of course, she didn’t really know what she was going to do when she got to St. Louis, but at least there was little chance of anyone finding her there. It had to be better than waiting until tomorrow morning to take a direct bus to LA.

“Okay, um, I’ll do that. How much is it?”

“With tax, nineteen dollars.”

Not bad. She wondered if she even needed Steve’s money to get to LA. Extra money couldn’t hurt, anyway; she didn’t want to go two days without eating. She extracted twenty dollars from her pocket, careful not to show that she had much more than that, and handed it to the woman through the little hole in the glass. The woman pressed a button and Max heard a ticket printing off, which was handed to her moments later along with her change.

“You good?” The woman questioned as she withdrew her hand from the hole in the glass. She gestured at her lip, as if indicating that she was questioning Max about her own.

“Yeah, just a door,” Max said. She didn’t feel the need to sell her story to this random woman.

The woman barely acknowledged that she’d even responded. “And you’re over twelve, correct?”

“Yes, I’m fourteen.”

“Okay, have a nice day.” The woman lowered her eyes, done with the interaction. Max backed away, ticket in hand.

Not wanting to sit outside in the rain, even under cover, Max retreated to the inside of the bus station and secured a spot on one of the many benches. For the next two hours, she sat there, getting up only to go to the bathroom to return her money to her shoe. When the big clock in the station showed it was precisely twelve o’clock, she switched to one of the outside benches, glad to see the rain had let up.

The bus to St. Louis showed up right on time, Max jumping up to meet it. About four other people stood nearby, also going to St. Louis. Max was the first on, ticket ready to show the driver and no bags besides her backpack to bring on board. She sensed that the driver and the other passengers were judging her, probably thinking loads of awful things about runaways, but she simply waltzed to the back of the bus and took a window seat. The seat was highly uncomfortable and it hurt to sit there. Before anyone could sit down near her and see, she unzipped her backpack and took two more aspirin tablets out of the bottle.

Max had forgotten to ask the woman at the ticket counter how long the bus ride would last, but she got the idea that it was going to be a while. At first, it was interesting to look at people and buildings as they drove through Indianapolis, but once they got on the highway it grew incredibly boring. A couple hours in, however, Max’s boredom was replaced with fear; she’d been traveling on pure adrenaline since this morning, not really thinking about each step of her plan until the previous one was completed. Now, on the bus, it dawned on her how terrible her plan really was.

What if when she got to St. Louis, the bus to LA wasn’t for another twenty-four hours? Was she going to sleep in the bus station? Was she allowed to sleep in the bus station? What if she was brutally murdered in her sleep? Okay, maybe the last one was unlikely, but still. It wasn’t _impossible_. What if she got arrested for running away? Would they ship her back to Hawkins? She shuddered to imagine what would happen if Neil discovered she’d run away and she then had to go back to him.

She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to clear her head, trying to channel whatever adrenaline she’d been running on before. She could do this. She had to do this. It wasn’t something she could go back on. She’d made her choice and that was that.

She must have fallen asleep. One minute the bus was soaring down the highway at sixty miles per hour, the next it was screeching into a parking spot in front of a bus station. This station was smaller than the one in Indianapolis, but the lettering was clear on a sign she saw through her window, reading ST. LOUIS in big bold letters.

Max scrambled up, not wanting to waste any time getting her ticket to LA. She mumbled a thank you to the bus driver before stepping onto the solid cement of St. Louis. The sun was setting, the sky full of orange and pink streaks that initially relaxed her, then sent a jolt of anxiety through her. It must be close to five o’clock; the day was slipping away, and the odds that there was a bus to LA leaving so late were slim.

The ticket counters at this bus station were outside, too. This time, Max’s ticket clerk was a man in his mid-thirties, who seemed more curious about her being there.

Feeling fluttery, Max spoke up, gripping the edge of the ticket counter. “Do you know when the next bus to LA is?” _Idiot, of course he knows, he works here_.

The ticket man nodded and started paging through a binder almost identical to the one back in Indianapolis. “Looks like it leaves at 5:30am.”

Max gripped the counter harder, her knuckles whitening. “AM, are you sure?”

“Yes, tomorrow morning, 5:30am. It’s seventy-five dollars. Do you want to buy a ticket?”

Max realized she hadn’t gotten her money back out of her shoe. “Will it sell out? Can I come back and buy one later?”

“It probably won’t sell out.” The man offered her a smile, more than the woman in Indianapolis had done.

Max swallowed and slackened her grip on the counter, struggling to form coherent thoughts. “Thanks,” she heard herself saying. The world looked distorted as she turned around and stumbled over to a bench, her worst fear confirmed: she was going to be here all night.

Darkness arrived too quickly for Max’s liking, descending upon the bus station gloomily. Highway overpasses ran over the station, the shadows they created turning blacker and blacker. She sat slumped on the bench for what felt like hours, too tired to make a plan of action, hoping time would miraculously transport her to tomorrow before she had to.

At some point, someone sat down next to her, and when she looked over she recognized it as the man from the ticket booth. He had a bag with him like he was going home. “I’m out of here,” he confirmed. “I just wanted to tell you that it’s probably not a good idea to sit out here all night. And it’s against policy if you were thinking about sleeping inside the station, so you might want to think of a better plan.”

Max wrapped her arms around herself. Unsure what to say, she said nothing.

The man got up and gave her a little wave before walking off towards the parking lot. “Good luck,” he called.

For some reason, his kindness only made Max more uneasy. She’d stayed up all night a couple times in her life, but not in a bus station in an unfamiliar city. She was extremely hungry, too, and if she couldn’t distract herself with sleep she thought she might literally throw up from hunger. She was queasy from nervousness alone as it was.

Uncertainly, Max stood up, maneuvering herself back to the ticket counter. “Excuse me,” she said, “do you know where I can buy something to eat?”

Without looking up, the new clerk told her, “There’s a McDonalds three blocks from here when you turn left on the street.”

In California, before moving to Hawkins, Max had roamed alone through the city during the day and never really felt like she was in danger. It had been a while since she’d been in that situation, but how different could St. Louis really be from San Diego? The x-factor was the fact that it was night. But even if it wasn’t the brightest idea to go somewhere else in a dark city, it wasn’t like the bus station was the safest place to be, either. She’d heard about shootings in bus stations on more than one occasion.

Not letting herself ruminate, she started for the street, walking the same path that the bus had taken but in the opposite direction. At the street, she took a left, moving as briskly as she could without running. This area was not like downtown San Diego or even downtown Indianapolis, that was for sure; stone buildings lined the streets but not many people were walking or driving on them, an eery calmness present instead. Max put her hands in her pockets, cold, and made a mental note to get out her warm jacket when she got to the McDonalds.

Some part of Max worried she might not reach her destination, but the walk was consolingly short and pretty soon she was in the McDonalds bathroom, unloading a small portion of her money and putting on her jacket. She ordered herself fries and a strawberry milkshake and stood off to the side to wait for it. When her number was called, she carried her tray to the nearest table, wanting to be as close to the employees as possible.

Max sat at her table as long after eating as she could without looking like she was loitering: about an hour in total. The clock on the wall read 8:44 as she threw her trash away and pushed out into the crisp air.

She’d walked for only a minute or two when she sensed someone behind her. She picked up her pace, heart thudding in her chest, but didn’t look back. Suddenly, she felt a hand on her arm.

“Hey, are you lost?” The owner of the hand tugged on her arm, twisting her around. It was a guy barely older than Steve or Billy, grinning in a way that disconcerted her. His words and grin suggested he was trying to be a good samaritan or something, but the hand on her arm said something different.

Max was quite literally unable to breathe, so tense she could barely feel his touch at all. She shook her head, eyes filling with tears of terror.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, continuing to grin. “Really, I’m not. I saw you walking earlier, I thought you might be in trouble. Do you need help?”

She shook her head again, tears spilling down her cheeks.

“Are you sure? It looks like you’re going somewhere, that backpack’s pretty full. Need a ride?” Through her blurry vision, Max noticed that his eyes were red, like he might be on something. Her heart lurched as she noticed something else: the unmistakable shape of a gun under his jacket.

His grin disappeared; he’d noticed that _she’d_ noticed the gun. “Okay, guess we’re not going to play nice,” he whispered chillingly. “Give me your backpack, _now_.”

Just her backpack? She was probably crazy to be slightly relieved in such a dangerous position. Not taking her eyes off the gun, she slid her backpack off. Before it was all the way off her harm, he snatched it and pulled hard, catching her arm at an odd angle that caused it to sear with pain.

“Okay, your pockets.” He pointed at her jeans pockets, which were empty except for a few dollars change from McDonalds. She turned them inside out, giving him the money with no hesitation. “You kids make it too easy,” he slurred. “You think you’re being all mature, but really you’re going to end up as a prostitute.” He spat the last word at her, the smell of liquor fresh on his breath.

Though the guy he hadn’t even opened his jacket, the more time Max spent in the presence of the gun the more convinced she became that she was going to die, that this was the end. How insane would it be if she died not because of the Mind Flayer but because of a drunk man with a gun in St. Louis, Missouri? Air was barely entering her lungs, her shallow gasping audible in the quiet emptiness surrounding both of them.

He stood there for a good fifteen seconds, laughing freakishly at her, then started to back away, holding up her backpack like loot that he had scored in a battle. She remained rooted in place until he was all the way at the end of the street, then spun around and ran.

She wasn’t sure she’d ever run that fast in her whole life. She kept wiping her hands over her eyes to clear her vision, but it blurred back over in seconds, her crying uncontrollable and with no end in sight. She was vaguely aware of arriving at the bus station and slowed down robotically, entering the station and sinking into one of the hard plastic seats. She drew her legs to her, wanting to be as small as possible, and buried her face in her knees. Silent sobs rattled through her.

When her crying finally subsided a little, Max looked up, scanning the bus station. Only a handful of people were there, none of them having noticed her or at least not cared enough to notice her. She didn’t feel remotely safe, but at least the likelihood of being attacked here was smaller. It wasn’t like she had anything good to steal anymore. God, her backpack. Her radio, her clothes, her aspirin. Her radio. She’d figured in LA she might be able to talk to her friends through Cerebro. Now that dream was dead.

At least she had her money. She stared down at her shoe, thankful for it in a way she had never been thankful before. Before someone tried to rip her shoe off her foot, she had better go buy the ticket to LA and prepare to spend the next eight hours in this station. She got up and headed to the bathroom without much determination. She was exhausted. She wanted to go to bed for three days and wake up somewhere nobody would ever hurt her ever again. If such a place even existed, she didn’t know.

In the bathroom, for the third time that day, she removed her shoe and counted out eighty dollars. It was more than half of her remaining money, and she clutched it in her hand the entire way out of the bathroom and the bus station and to the ticket counter. The clerk was the same one who’d told her about the McDonalds, but he didn’t seem interested in how that experience had gone. Once she had exchanged her money for the precious ticket, she went back inside the bus station bathroom and stowed it in her shoe with the money. She hoped that tomorrow morning the bus driver wouldn’t object to it being a little sweaty.

Nothing left to do but wait, Max tried and failed to make herself comfortable in one of the hard plastic seats. The aspirin she’d taken on the bus had worn off and with none to replace its effects, Max felt dull pain all over her body. The pain did serve one purpose: reminding her why she was here. Tomorrow she’d be on her way to LA, where even if she faced a whole new slew of problems, they wouldn’t involve Neil.

She found herself crying again; at this point, she didn’t even know why. She saw the gun in her mind’s eye and then it transformed into Neil’s face, cold and merciless. She wrapped her arms around her legs and closed her eyes, allowing the wetness to envelop her face. The images in her head were growing dimmer, fading.

She was asleep.

Then, she was not. Someone was shaking her. She blinked open her eyes, confused, and grew even more confused when she saw that the lighting in the bus station had completely changed. It was brighter.

A security guard’s face was inches from hers. “How long have you been asleep?” He demanded.

Max’s eyes drifted sloppily to the large digital clock at the front of the bus station. 6:22.

She leapt up, panic exploding in her head.

The security guard shook his head at her. “From now on, no sleeping, it’s against the rules.”

She didn’t care about the rules.

She cared that she had missed her bus.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I kind of messed up on the bus pricing previously because I had NO IDEA that Greyhound buses are so cheap and readily available??? Weird. But I did my best to make the numbers of the money work out.
> 
> Also, the reason why Max thinks about San Diego and not LA is because she's from San Diego and her dad lives in LA (I got this from Runaway Max)!


	8. Intervention

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry for posting this late! I had a huge English project that I had to spend my writing time working on yesterday :/

**November 10, 1985**

Max flew out of the bus station, searching desperately for her bus like it somehow might still be there. It wasn’t, obviously. This couldn’t be happening. What if the next bus to LA wasn’t until tomorrow? No, that wasn’t the issue at hand. The issue was that she didn’t have enough money for another bus ticket to LA. Doing a mental tally of her money, she only had around fifty dollars left.

A heavy pressure settling in her chest, Max went back to the ticket counter, tired of talking to these people who never gave her good news. Embarrassed, she announced in a falsely bold tone, “I missed my bus. Can I have a refund?” Cringe-worthy, that’s what this was. She was a dumb fourteen-year-old girl who had missed her bus and thought she could get her money back just like that. In reality, she knew it was a long shot.

“Sorry, all tickets are non-refundable.” The ticket person was a lady this time, but for all intents and purposes these employees were all the same person. She tilted her head at Max and asserted, “I’d call your parents and have them call the corporate office. Sometimes they can swing things.”

Her parents. The idea was laughable. “No, it’s important that I get another ticket,” Max pressed. “Can I exchange the ticket I missed for a new one? I don’t need my money itself back.”

A head shake. “Sorry. Non-refundable, non-exchangeable. You got someone you can call to bring you more money?”

Max didn’t say no, but her lack of a response served the same purpose.

“Listen, kid, you want my advice?”

Not really.

“Go back where you came from. This never works out. Last week, some kid got stabbed running away from home. You hear about that? You missing your bus was probably a sign.”

Max most definitely did not believe in signs or karma or any of that stuff. Nothing in her life implied it was real. Maybe Billy’s death was karma for the stuff he’d done before, but if that was true then karma was broken and Max wanted nothing to do with it. She got what the lady was saying, though. Maybe it was good she wasn’t on the bus to LA. She’d questioned this plan a million times by now, and had turned back to it each time only out of fear of going back on herself.

Max chewed the inside of her cheek, deliberating. “When is the next bus to Indianapolis?” She asked. Nothing wrong with asking.

The lady appeared satisfied with this question. After her search through the trusty binder, she informed Max that it left at eight. Max thanked her and left, still deliberating over her options. Right now, she basically only had two: go back to Hawkins or stay here and try to get more money. Realistically, that was one option and one path to death. She didn’t want to be a homeless teenager that would eventually get shot or stabbed. Hell, she’d already been mugged and she’d been a runaway for only twenty-four hours. Living with Neil, she could be pretty sure she wouldn’t be shot.

Living with Neil…was she really going back to that? She’d failed to get herself out. If that was her punishment, it seemed fair in a twisted way.

There was the matter of her friends, but her experience last night had indirectly handed her an excuse that might be good enough to get her out of foster care: she’d been mugged. Muggers hit you in the face, didn’t they? Yeah, there were flaws to the story, but she did not have the emotional bandwidth to consider them all individually.

Time to do something she might regret but would regret more if she _didn’t_ do. She wasn’t hitchhiking from Indianapolis to Hawkins when she got back. Last night taught her that strangers were as dangerous as the people you knew. If she wouldn’t voluntarily take a long car ride with Neil (which she most certainly wouldn’t), she wasn’t going to get in the car with a stranger who might kill her. She was not dumb and she stood by that.

There was a pay phone inside the station, close to the bathrooms. Max had got change for a dollar from the ticket booth while buying her ticket to Indianapolis, and then waited until seven to make the call. She now inserted a quarter into the phone, nervously tapping her foot on the tiled floor as she dialed the Sinclairs’ phone number.

It rang once, twice, three times. No answer. It wasn’t until the beep sounded and Max had slammed the receiver back onto the wall in frustration that she remembered it was Sunday and Lucas’s family would be at church. It was an hour later in Hawkins than in St. Louis, something else she’d forgotten. By the time they were home from church, she’d be on the bus.

Max only knew one other phone number by heart: the Wheelers’. She put in another quarter, punching the numbers in hurriedly, holding her breath to quiet it as she held the receiver to her ear.

“Wheeler residence, Mrs. Wheeler speaking.”

Max’s grip on the phone tightened. “Hi, Mrs. Wheeler, this is Max. Is Mike there?”

“Max! I missed you yesterday, why weren’t you hanging out with the others?”

“Busy with school, you know…” This wasn’t the time for small talk, but Mrs. Wheeler didn’t know she was using a pay phone. “Can I talk to Mike?” She tried not to sound too pushy.

“You know what, he’s still asleep. I can tell him you called.”

“No, it’s kind of important.” Kind of. Just kind of. “Can you wake him up? I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t time-sensitive.”

“Uh, okay, hold on.” She seemed intrigued, and Max sincerely hoped Mrs. Wheeler wasn’t planning to eavesdrop on their conversation.

The wait was long; Max had time to scuff her shoe from running it along the floor so much. About four minutes after Mrs. Wheeler had told her to hold on, there was a click and Mike’s sleepy voice came on, “Max?”

Max waited until she heard the sound of Mrs. Wheeler hanging up in the background. “Mike, I have to ask you-”

“ _Max_ , what the hell, where are you?” Even through the sleepiness of it, his voice was tense. “We looked for you for ages yesterday. And Steve told us all this stuff, about you going somewhere and getting in a fight…Are you at home?”

Max leaned back against the wall. “No, no I’m not, I’m on a pay phone, so can we play twenty questions later?” Or never. Never sounded better.

Mike lowered his voice. “Did something happen with your family? Lucas said they were fighting. Are you okay?”

“Mike, _pay phone_!” Her irritation at the world was manifesting itself as irritation at him. “Can you just listen to me?”

“Fine, sorry.”

“Can you get Steve to come pick me up at the Indianapolis bus station in like five and a half hours?” She continued to tap her foot, uneasy.

There was a pause as Mike processed this request. “The Indianapolis bus station? Are you on a bus?!”

“Yes, I am calling you from a newly invented mobile bus pay phone.” She cringed at her own sarcasm. She didn’t want to be a bitch. “Sorry. No, I’m…in St. Louis. I’m taking a bus back. I said no questions, Mike.”

“ _I_ didn’t agree to no questions!” Another pause. “St. Louis, shit. Do you promise you’re okay?”

This time it wasn’t really a lie; all things considered, she could be worse. “I promise. And I’m coming back, aren’t I? So nothing to worry about.”

“I can’t believe you ran away, Max.” He was freaked out, it was obvious. “I don’t believe you if you say nothing’s wrong. You can talk to us, you know. Friends don’t lie.”

Always the same phrase. She’d defied it more times than she cared to recollect.

“I have to hang up in thirty seconds,” she said softly. “You’ll tell Steve, right? My bus will be there at 12:25.” She’d asked this time.

“I’ll tell him,” Mike said. "We’ll be there when you get there. I promise.”

Mike’s promises were not something she’d ever disbelieve, and profound relief washed over her at the words. “Okay, good. Thanks.”

“Yeah, Max.”

Max exhaled when she hung up the phone. If she didn’t focus on the part of this plan that involved going back to Neil, she was aware of how good it felt to be going back to Hawkins instead of trying to make her own way to LA. She didn’t want to admit that she’d been wrong, that she had acted rashly, but deep down the recognition of it was there.

In the bathroom, Max leaned in to the mirror to get a good look at her face. A lot of her makeup had come off, some of it just flaky from having been on so long and some of it smeared from crying yesterday. She wished she still had her backpack with the containers of makeup in it, but dwelling on the loss of any of her stuff was silly. The existence of the bruising was obvious even where the makeup still resided, so there was little point to it anymore. She took a paper towel from the dispenser, wet it, and started to wipe off the makeup.

She hadn’t even realized how gross her face had felt with all that makeup on, but once it was gone she felt a million times better. Placing pressure on the bruised areas of her face increased the pain she felt from them a little bit, but at this point she had grown used to the constant unwavering pain everywhere that her stolen Aspirin could no longer minimize.

With one last look at the mess that was her banged up face, Max returned to the main part of the bus station. Her bus showed up ten minutes early but she was there to meet it when it did, not about to miss a bus for the second time.

Not having to worry about sleeping in a bus station in a strange city, the bus ride back to Indianapolis was less stressful than the one there had been. Well, stressful in a different way. Max kept trying to plan for what she was going to do when she got home and what she was going to say to her friends, but every time she broached the subject in her own head she came up devoid of answers. The thought that she was probably going to face a detailed interrogation the moment she was picked up in Indianapolis chilled her inside.

Her reason for running away was still in Hawkins, and it wasn’t going away unless she asked for someone to make it go away. But if she did open up about it, her reasons for not telling anyone would be realized. There was no perfect third option. Running away had _been_ the third option. She guessed she’d just have to see how things played out when she got there.

The sun was at its peak brightness when the bus rolled into the Indianapolis station. Moving up the aisle to the exit of the bus, Max took deep breaths in and out and prepared herself to see her friends. The clock showed it as only being 12:13, since the bus had left early, and she was about to settle down on a bench to wait until 12:25 when she heard her name being called in the distance.

She first saw Steve’s car out in the parking lot, then her eyes focused in on Lucas, Mike, and Dustin running towards her at full speed. Steve was behind them.

She had been pretty reserved this morning ever since she’d missed her bus, but tears welled in her eyes at the sight of them. She couldn’t believe she’d left them in the first place.

Lucas got to her first, flinging his arms around her. They weren’t like Mike and Eleven, they didn’t hug _all_ the time, but now the hug sent the tears streaming down her face. He squeezed her tightly and she didn’t tell him it hurt, less because he’d wonder why and more because she didn’t care. She felt wobbly, the obsessive thoughts that had filled her mind the entire bus ride going fuzzy.

Before Lucas had even pulled away from her, Mike and Dustin loomed in front of her face, staring at it with widened eyes. The child in Max wanted to go back to hugging Lucas and skip this next part, but life didn’t go like that.

“I was mugged,” she said quickly in response to their expressions, wiping away tears with the back of her arm. “This guy in St. Louis took my backpack. And…hit me.”

Lucas looked horrified to see her face up close, as did Steve, who was standing with them now. Normally Max didn’t mind being the center of attention, but in this case she definitely did. Scared of what any of them would say when they said something, she continued talking, words running over each other. “I was wrong to run away, I just got sick of Neil and my mom fighting. It’s true that they fight a lot, _just_ fight, but it sucks, and I was stupid. And you know I don’t usually say I was stupid, so I have to have been really stupid.” She rolled her eyes at herself for emphasis.

The sarcasm and somewhat lighthearted attitude about the entire thing were not reciprocated.

“Max,” Lucas said, sounding like he himself was close to tears, “you’re not stupid. You're super smart. You’d only run away if you thought you had to.” His confidence in her was touching, at least.

Dustin cut in, “And what about your lip? Steve said that was like that yesterday!”

“And your arm,” Mike added. “There’s too many things.”

She was well aware that there were too many things.

“Okay, slow it down,” Steve announced, interrupting Lucas from saying something else. “We’ll do questions later. Let’s go home before I get a parking ticket; Max already stole all my money.”

Max was grateful to Steve but avoided looking in the direction of his worried gaze, walking towards the car in the middle of her friends. Before she could climb into the backseat with Lucas and Mike, Steve put his hand on her shoulder to stop her, the action slow and light like he remembered the way she’d jumped at his house yesterday.

“Max,” he said quietly, “whatever kind of shit you’re in, you’re better off trusting us than whatever bullshit person is telling you to lie. I’ll give you a break for now, but Jesus…you better be able to explain all this later.”

Max snuck a glance at him, sliding her hands into the pockets of her jacket, and got into the car. Steve went around to the driver's side and started the engine, reversing and driving out of the parking lot.

On the drive back to Hawkins, Max’s friends indulged her story about getting mugged. The absence of her backpack was evidence that it had happened in some form, and her willingness to share made it the easiest topic of conversation.

“He just wanted my stuff and my money,” Max explained, “but he was super creepy, like not _Terminator_ creepy but more like if Steve went crazy and got all mean…and he had a gun, too, which was the worst part.” She shivered at the memory.

“He had a GUN?” Dustin exclaimed from the front seat. “Holy shit, did he shoot you?”

“Yes, he shot me in the leg, that’s why I’m bleeding right now.”

“Wait, really?” Dustin craned his neck to see and the rest of them rolled their eyes.

“It was a _joke_ -”

“Guns are _serious_ -”

“You really think in another life I could be a brutal mugger?” Steve asked.

“Not unless you start winning more fights,” Dustin said.

“It’s not about _winning_ all the fights, it’s about being stealthy, like a ninja.”

They now all rolled their eyes at Steve, the conversation comfortable but concealing the tenseness underneath it.

The whole way back, Lucas kept glancing at Max when he thought she wasn’t looking. Mike did the same, and even Dustin kept finding reasons to turn around and look at her. She felt like a spectacle in a circus, whether they were staring out of morbid curiosity or out of concern for her.

Max had never been as happy to see the “Welcome to Hawkins” sign. She let out a breath that didn’t go unnoticed by Lucas, who smiled covertly at her from beside her. She smiled back.

Steve parked towards the front of the cul-de-sac where the Wheeler house was situated and got out of the car with them. Mike led the way down the street to the side door into his basement. Max was fairly certain Steve had never been in the basement before, which was odd; this whole thing felt like another round of fighting the Mind Flayer.

Max sat down on the couch immediately, but everyone else hesitated before sitting, exchanging hidden glances with one another. She awkwardly stared forward, pretending not to notice.

“Max,” Lucas began as if on cue, “we know you wouldn’t run away unless you had a reason, and we added up everything and we’re sure we know what it is. First, Carol said your stepdad hit Billy, and Billy’s gone, so…Second, Mike said your arm was bruised last week. Third, your parents were fighting on Friday and when I called you something was clearly wrong. Fourth-”

“Is this some kind of intervention?” Max burst out. Lucas didn’t sound anything like himself, more like a prose that had been written and memorized. And her friends were all alarmingly fixated on her reaction. If it were about anyone else, the whole thing would have been funny. As it was, she felt flustered and annoyed. “This is insane.”  
Steve didn’t look like he’d been a part of this plan, whatever it was, but shrugged his shoulders like he was not on her side. Obviously. “It doesn’t seem that insane.”

“You aren’t saying anything to change our minds,” Mike insisted. She glared at him.

Lucas leaned back on the couch, sighing. She was guilty about stressing him out so much. “Tell us why we shouldn’t believe your stepdad is doing this to you, Max,” Lucas said. The tone was more like himself and it hurt Max a bit inside.

She pursed her lips together uncertainly. She was backed into a corner and every time she made up another lie she died more inside.

“Like I said before,” Steve said, “we get can you out of this shit, kid. People always want you to lie for them and all that crap, but it’s bull. You think you’re winning right now with your head half smashed in?”

Max didn’t bother reminding him that that was supposedly from the mugger, because she knew they hadn’t forgotten and didn’t care.

“There’s four of us, Max,” Dustin added, “and plus Will and El that’s six! Your piece of garbage stepdad is just one guy.”

Mike tacked on: “We know you’re lying when you say it’s not him, so-”

_“So what!”_ Max interrupted heatedly, standing up. She was not about to cry again, not about to let them talk her into making a choice they didn’t understand the repercussions of. “You guys are the ones that are full of shit! You don’t know how the real world works, clearly! We don’t all have nice parents and it sucks, but what am I gonna do about that? Tell someone? Do you guys want to never see me again?”

She stopped to catch her breath and was met with four scandalized expressions. Even though she’d only confirmed what they had already known, they’d probably all been holding out some hope that there would be some _other_ explanation she was hiding, some _other_ thing that wasn’t as hard to fight as this thing. Because in her honest opinion, monsters and government workers were easier to fight than this.

“That son of a bitch,” Steve finally broke the silence, saying what they were all thinking. “You cannot go back to your house.”

“Sorry, but I think I’m going to have to go back to the place where I live,” Max said sarcastically. She was using anger and sarcasm as defense mechanisms and she knew it and they knew it but it was preferable to the alternative. “We saw how running away worked out for me, didn’t we?”

“But you can tell someone, Max,” Mike pushed, making eye contact with her. She looked away. “This is illegal.”

“Which takes me back to the point of you guys never seeing me again-”

“You can’t just let him do that to you-”

_“No.”_ Max lowered her voice but held onto her ferocity. “You guys aren’t the ones who have to deal with this, I do. So it’s my choice.”

Lucas had been silent for a while, watching her pensively. “We can’t let this happen to you,” he whispered, more to her than the entire group. “We can figure out how to help you, Max.”

She wanted to believe him, but didn’t. The basement seemed suffocating all of a sudden, trapping her in to this conversation when before her friends had always been her escape.

“This is over,” she said, trying to be calmer so they’d take her more seriously. “This intervention or whatever, it’s over. If you guys want to go to the arcade or something, I’m down. Otherwise…I’m out.”

“Excuse me, but this conversation is not over,” Steve replied. “And if you think you’re going back to your house, well, uh…you’re _wrong_. I am putting my foot down, and I’m a legal adult so-”

She bugged her eyes at him as if to say _so…?_ Then she marched across the basement and out the side door.

She’d barely made it to the street when Lucas was behind her, calling her name. She spun around and was glad to see it was just him; all of them together talking about something so sensitive to her had been overwhelming.

“Max, you can’t just let him keep doing this to you,” Lucas pleaded.

She frowned, her heart fluttering. “It sucks,” she admitted, pressure building up behind her eyes again. Something about Lucas made it hard to lie to him face-to-face. “I hate it. But you don’t get it. I can’t just tell the police or something. It’s not like we have Hopper anymore.”

“But whatever happens has to be better than this.” He gestured to her face. “It’s not like people aren’t going to notice.”

“You didn’t for months,” she pointed out. “He’s never hurt me like this before. It was just one time, I swear. It’s not going to be that bad again.”

“So you admit it wasn’t a mugger.” Lucas raised his eyebrows at her, a hint of a smile on his face at catching her in the lie.

“Okay fine, I was mugged, and he did have a gun, but he didn’t hit me.”

“God, Max…” Lucas looked so _sad_. “Even if he doesn’t usually hit you that badly, anything is too much. And if he did it once, he could do it again. Do you really think he won’t?”

No, Max was pretty sure that if she lived with Neil for four more years, it would happen again. She bit her lip.

“There’s got to be a way to fix this,” Lucas continued. “Just let us try to help you. Don’t be so stubborn.”

“So now I’m stubborn?” She pretended to be offended.

He rolled his eyes, laughing. “Yes, always.”

She held out her hand to him and he took it, gripping it like he never wanted to let go. She allowed him to lead her back to the Wheelers’ basement, wondering if she had gone crazy or if she was finally being smart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think I might have originally intended for her to be a runaway longer, but I prefer this because it was more about the fact that she'd run away at all; I don't think it would be as interesting to go on multiple chapters with her not being in Hawkins.


	9. School Policy

Though Max tried to appreciate her friends’ commitment to helping her, the reality was that there _was_ no perfect solution to her problem. She either told the police and made it stop by getting taken away from her family (if that even happened), or she didn’t and nothing changed. She and her friends disagreed on which of those was preferable, but everyone agreed that neither were good solutions.

Finally, over half an hour after Max had come back into the basement with Lucas, a vague consensus was reached: Max would go home for now and do her best to convince her mother to leave Neil. If anything with even a hint of violence attached to it happened in her house she would get out and call Steve to pick her up. If she was in serious danger, she would call the police.

The whole plan was kind of garbage, in Max’s private opinion. If she’d thought there was any chance of her mother divorcing Neil, she’d have broached the idea ages ago; it was unlikely that she’d even get the chance to have such a conversation with Susan. And as for “anything with a hint of violence attached to it” happening, well that was basically a guarantee. Max had no idea how she was supposed to subtly call Steve before fleeing, and she knew she wouldn’t be calling the police for any reason short of Neil coming at her with a steak knife.

She recognized it was her fault that the plan was so flimsy. She had not been remotely forthcoming with the honest truth about how often Neil hurt her and how bad it typically was. She couldn’t help that. It wasn’t easy being truthful about this stuff, and she’d much rather know her friends had her back than be pressured do something more drastic. It did feel nice, knowing her friends had her back. She’d been alone in this for so long.

The stress of figuring out how to handle this situation postponed for a while, the afternoon managed to become a somewhat normal one, all things considered. Steve left to go to work, making Max promise about sixty times that she would call him at the first sign of trouble. She did, hoping she would keep the promise. She spent the rest of the afternoon at the Wheelers’.

At dinnertime, Mike coerced his mother into inviting all of them to stay. They’d briefly discussed how Max would explain her face to other people, and resolved that she should tell them she was attacked in Indianapolis while shopping with her mother. It was extreme enough and appropriate enough to warrant belief.

Mrs. Wheeler looked unnecessarily horrified at the bruises, Max thought, but wholeheartedly bought the story, believing this was also why Max had called Mike in the morning. When the inevitable time for them to leave arrived, Lucas told Max his dad would drive her home, seeing as she didn’t have her skateboard. She nodded, using all her willpower to stifle the fear bubbling inside her.

“Remember,” Lucas whispered as they walked up the path to his house, “you have to call Steve if he-”

“I _know_ , Lucas, you’ve all said that one _thousand_ times by now. It’s fine, my mom thought I was spending the night over here last night. They don’t know I ran away. Neil doesn’t have a reason to be mad at me.” He didn’t usually need a reason any reasonable human could think of, but she was attempting to reassure herself as much as Lucas.

“I wish you didn’t lose your radio,” Lucas lamented. She’d told them all that thanks to her mugger in St. Louis she was now unreachable by radio. It killed her; she had loved that radio like a friend.

“Yeah, I guess life sucks.”

Mr. Sinclair appeared more skeptical about Max’s mugging story, but didn’t press the issue. Max’s house was quiet when he pulled up in front of it.

By some miracle, nothing of any interest value happened all night. The following day was November 11, Veterans’ Day, so there was no school. Max spent the day out and returned in the late afternoon. Again, nothing interesting happened. Neil barely spoke to her. Susan seemed to be trying extra hard to be nice, but it was so covert that it wasn’t much of a change. Max fell asleep on Monday night more relaxed than she had been in days.

**November 12, 1985**

Max set her alarm to wake her up a little earlier on Tuesday morning. She was hoping her mother would let Max borrow some of her makeup. Susan consented immediately, acting like Max was making the request because she wanted be done up and look beautiful. She was plainly aware of Max’s real reason for asking, but Max didn’t mention it, following her mother into the master bathroom.

Max had spent almost no time in her mother’s and Neil’s bedroom. She saw a few dollar bills scattered on the top of their dresser; that must be where she’d been accused of stealing from last week.

Susan kept her makeup in a plastic tub in a neat corner of the bathroom counter. She opened it and removed a container slightly different than the one for the foundation Max had used before. “I use powder foundation now,” she explained. Yes, there was definitely an unspoken understanding about the purpose the makeup was supposed to serve. “It doesn’t really cover things as well as the other one, but…I mean, it can’t hurt.”

Not very encouraging. Max took the container from her, not sure what to do with it.

Susan smiled awkwardly and offered, “I can put it on you, if you want.” Weird; Max had never thought she and her mother would be doing makeup together. Granted, it wasn’t under a normal set of teenage girl circumstances, but still. She nodded, lifting herself up to sit on the counter.

Susan took a fluffy brush from her tub of makeup and dipped it lightly into the foundation, tapping off the excess. She lightly dusted it all over Max’s face, going back over the bruised left side with more and more powder. It clearly wasn’t working very well because Susan’s face grew more and more focused, her mouth formed into a tight line. After the fourth time over Max’s bruise, she stopped, setting the brush and foundation on the counter resolutely.

Max twisted around to face the mirror. The unbruised portions of her skin certainly looked clearer, but her bruise was still very apparent, little flakes of light powder sitting on top of it without concealing it. “Do you have any concealer?” She asked, remembering the effectiveness of the concealer previously.

But Susan shook her head. The longer her eyes fixated on Max’s face, the more subdued she became. “I don’t wear that much makeup anymore,” she said harrowingly. Max realized that she hadn’t, in fact, seen her mother wearing makeup in a while. She always looked tired nowadays, eyes free of the eyeshadow she used to always wear in California.

Max sighed. She had her story about getting mugged, yes, but she’d been hoping makeup would prevent any explanation being required from anyone at all. It’s not like most people asked about things like this, they just formed opinions from afar. “I guess it’s better than nothing,” she said. It wasn’t, really. “Thanks.”

Susan nodded. “I’m sorry you have to deal with this,” she said cautiously, unable to make eye contact with Max.

“It’s not your fault,” Max replied pointedly. This was probably her one opportunity to follow through on her vow to talk to her mother about divorcing Neil. Nervously, she added, “It’s his, Mom. I know you’re scared but…what if…what if you just left him? He couldn’t do this if he wasn’t here.”

Susan’s eyes were red. “Oh honey, we can’t just run away from all our problems.” At least she wasn’t full on denying that Neil was a problem.

“But what if we did? People talk about these things, and if someone finds out, you could lose me. Would you rather have him than lose me?” She couldn’t believe she said that. But it wasn’t just a tactic of manipulation; she was really, truly wondering.

Susan’s eyes somehow grew redder, her cheeks flushed the same scarlet color. “You’re my daughter, Max, of course not. But this time was different. I can’t just leave him for a one time thing like this.”

“Why not?” Max was sure her eyes were reddening, too. “Do you love him that much?” Another question she was wondering about but afraid to hear the answer to. She was being bold today.

“He’s my husband,” was all Susan said to that question. “Let me worry about this stuff, honey. I know you’ll do the right thing. I bet you already have some perfect explanation for this cooked up in your head. You’re so smart, I don’t even know where you get it.”

Let her worry about this stuff when it was _Max_ who got slammed into walls? Let her worry when it was _Max_ whose face was the color of half-ripened blackberries?

Frustrated, Max climbed off the counter, done with trying to talk to her mother. “I don’t get it from you, that’s for sure,” she snapped before heading out of the bathroom.

As Mad had anticipated, the stares from complete strangers at school were insurmountable. They began the second she entered the building and never ceased. Her friends glared at everyone they caught staring, but Max didn’t bother. There was no reason to care what people thought when nothing she did would ever stop the rumors. A few people asked about it and she told them her story about being mugged, gesturing to the messenger bag she was using to carry her school supplies because her backpack had been stolen.

Nothing more than stares and whispering came until about twenty minutes into art with Lucas and Dustin, after lunch. Max was laughing at Dustin’s horrible attempt at drawing a lion when the beep of the intercom resounded through the room, causing everyone to pause their loud chatter.

“Maxine Mayfield, please report to the office.”

Immediately, twenty-four pairs of eyes turned to focus on Max. She felt her cheeks grow hot, exchanging horrified glances with Lucas and Dustin. Lucas, who sat across from Max, leaned forward to whisper, “Do you think it’s about…you know…?”

“What else?” She’d never been to the Hawkins High office before. “It’s fine, I’ll be fine,” she said more confidently than was accurate.

Lucas and Dustin continued to look worried as she got up from her spot and headed to the front of the room. The art teacher, an eccentric woman in her forties, nodded to indicate Max should leave now. Even she was looking at Max’s bruise.

The walk was shorter than Max remembered. It seemed like one second she was leaving her classroom and the next second she was at the double doors into the carpeted front office, her hand so sweaty that it was difficult to grip the handle on the door.

The receptionist smiled too widely at Max as she entered. “Maxine Mayfield, great to see you!” Max had never seen this woman before in her life. “Just take a seat, Principal Murphy will be out to see you in a few minutes.”

Max perched herself on the chair furthest from the reception desk. She ran her fingers over the seat cushion, thinking how much nicer it would’ve been if the seats in the bus station were like these. “A few minutes” was generous terminology because it was at least ten before the principal came out of her office, calling Max in. She was a kind but professional-looking woman in a business suit.

She allowed Max to enter her office first, shutting the door behind them. The action was probably normal but it made Max even more tense. Max took a seat in front of the principal’s desk, waiting for the principal to sit down across from her.

“Maxine, how are you today?” Principal Murphy’s tone was hideously fake but very standard for people in her position.

“I’m good,” Max responded bluntly.

“I’m sure you’re wondering why I’ve called you here?”

“Not really.”

“Oh, what reason were you thinking?”

Max inhaled and exhaled slowly, reminding herself that being bitchy wasn’t necessarily a beneficial tactic. “My face, I’m guessing.” She smiled at the surprised look on the principal’s face at her acknowledgement of this.

“Well, yes,” the principal said, eyes studying Max curiously. “A couple teachers informed us of rumors going around that this might have something to do with your family. Regardless, we of course wanted to make sure you’re all right; that’s a pretty nasty bruise you’ve got there. Would you mind telling me how you got it?”

“Sure.” Max perfected the angelically innocent look on her face. “I was in Indianapolis over the weekend, to see a movie–you know, _A Nightmare on Elm Street_ –and I was cornered by some crazy person and mugged. They stole my backpack and hit me in the face, but otherwise I’m totally fine.”

Whatever Principal Murphy was expecting to hear, this wasn’t it. “Oh no!” She gasped, again in an extremely fake way. “Did you file a police report?”

“Well I was _going_ to, but I couldn’t have possibly described the guy, it happened so fast. It’s really not a big deal, it looks a lot worse than it is. Really, it doesn’t even hurt.” Not really a lie, only because Max was downing Aspirins every few hours.

It wasn’t obvious whether or not the principal believed Max’s story. She probably didn’t, being a school principal and seeing all kinds of shit, but she had no proof that it was anything else so what she personally believed mattered little. “It does look bad, you’re right,” Principal Murphy said carefully. “Would you mind if I made a call home, just to verify that everything’s okay?”

Shit. Yes, Max would mind. Neil might think she’d ratted. Even if he didn’t, he would not like that her school suspected him of abuse. She couldn’t say for sure what he’d do about it, but she didn’t want to find out.

“That won’t be necessary,” Max said hurriedly. Maybe too hurriedly, but whatever. “They already know about me being mugged, it’s…um…very upsetting to them. Between us, I don’t think it would be good for my mom to have to think about it all over again.”

The principal’s hand hovered over the phone. “I’m afraid it’s policy to call home under these circumstances,” she said, watching Max for any sort of reaction. “I’m sure you understand that.”

She did, but this was bad. Maybe really bad.

“Of course I understand.” Max resisted the urge to slap the principal’s hand away from the telephone. “But you can ask any of my friends to corroborate my story, they were with me in Indianapolis.” She wasn’t sure that her friends would want to lie to the principal, but she was just trying to buy herself some time.

The principal removed her hand from the phone but continued watching Max intently. “Well, I’ll see what I can do, Maxine. But there are some rules I have to follow, so I will probably have to call home. You can go back to class for now.”

Some extra time was probably the best Max could ask for. It occurred to her only as she was halfway back to art class, the pass the principal had written her in hand, that she should have let things be. Right now, her mother was home. If a call was placed later in the day, Susan might be gone from the house. The only other number in the directory was Neil’s workplace, meaning she had unintentionally given the principal reason to call Neil directly. If a call was placed even later in the day, Neil would be home. God, she was an idiot.

Back in art, Lucas and Dustin gave her the third degree. She answered their questions passively, her mind elsewhere. When the bell rang, Lucas walked with her to her last class, talking to her in a hushed tone.

“Are you okay? You seem off.”

She was off. Her mind kept envisioning Neil in his cubicle at some made-up office in her head (she’d never been to his actual workplace), his phone ringing. “Don’t worry about me, Lucas,” she said absently.

“Wow, you’re so good at advice,” he replied sarcastically.

She laughed with him briefly, but the laughter didn’t take over the darkness in her eyes. “Just praying Principal Murphy doesn’t call my stepdad,” she admitted.

“Oh shit, is she going to? What do you think he’ll do?” Lucas looked like he, too, didn’t really want to know. He walked close to her, their shoulders touching.

“I don’t know,” Max said in response to both questions. They’d arrived at her classroom. “I’ll see you after school.”

Lucas seemed like he had more to say, but noticing the look on her face, he didn’t. He waved and disappeared down the hall. She slid the messenger bag strap further up her shoulder and entered the classroom.

After school, Max got her skateboard from her locker and went to the usual meeting spot, but without her usual eagerness to be done with school and free to have fun for the next few hours. The next few hours were not going to be fun.

Once all three of her friends had unlocked their bikes, she informed them she couldn’t hang out with them today.

“Wait, what?” Mike exclaimed, the fastest. “Where are you going?”

Max looked down at her feet. “Home…”

“What the hell?” Mike and Dustin spoke in unison. Lucas had more of an idea as to why she was going home, so he just looked at her like she’d lost some brain cells.

“Okay, relax,” Max said, eyebrows raised, like _chill_. “My stepdad isn’t even home this early. I just have to do something.”

It was true that Neil normally didn’t get home this early, but if things had gone the worst way possible Max couldn’t promise he wouldn’t be home. She didn’t feel the need to elaborate, however.

“Is this about the principal or something?” Mike asked, quieter this time. Clearly Dustin had filled him in. Anyway, her call to the office _had_ been broadcast to the entire school.

She nodded, impatient. If she got home as quickly as possible, she might be able to answer the phone and prevent shit from going down. She didn’t have time for this. “She said she had to call my parents, so I’m hoping if I get home I can stop that from happening, okay? Good enough for you guys? I gotta go.” She stepped onto her skateboard and kicked off, ignoring the protests of her friends.

“Wait, Max, remember-” Lucas called to her back as she rolled away from them.

“Call Steve!” She shouted back. “I haven’t forgotten since the last seventy times you told me!”

The trip home took forever. Max hadn’t gone home directly after school in months, and she was surprised at how empty these roads were even in the late afternoon. As she skated past the part of the road where Billy had once try to run her friends down in his Camaro, she felt less in control of her skateboard, swiveling haphazardly around the ruts in the road. Had that really only been a year ago? It felt like a lifetime.

Max’s heart sunk when she spotted Neil’s car at the house. There was no way he was home right now unless he’d gotten the call from the principal. He worked, like, eleven hour days. Max contemplated leaving, but it didn’t make sense to postpone whatever was going to go down. As it was, she’d be better off fleeing the house at four o’clock than at nine. If she had to flee the house. She interlaced her fingers together, praying to whatever God existed that her doom did not await her in that house. The plan established by her friends was a temporary solution, one that would definitely change if it became apparent that Neil was constantly harming her.

Max left her skateboard outside, ready in case she needed to make a quick getaway, and unlocked the front door with her key. Neil and Susan were seated in the living room, having a heated but not quite angry discussion. Susan was looking imploringly at Neil, who was using the same tone he used when he ranted about politics. He stopped talking the instant he saw her. She shut the front door uncomfortably.

“I must admit I didn’t expect you home so early, Maxine,” Neil said loudly.

 _I didn’t expect you home so early either_ , she thought bitterly.

“We’re having a family discussion that was sparked by a call I received this afternoon.”

Max remained stationary by the door. The key in her hand was swinging back and forth slightly because her hand was shaking so much. “What call?” She asked, her voice unnaturally high-pitched.

“From your principal. Wanted to know if you home situation is… _stable_.” He emphasized the last word scornfully. “I was just telling your mother how nosy people in small towns are, thinking they know everything about everyone else’s families. She said you told her you were mugged, which was the right thing to do. We owe nothing to these people.”

Max was shocked. Neil had never praised her for anything. She silently thanked her principal for making it clear she had not ratted, whether or not it was intentional. This could be going a lot worse.

Neil didn’t wait for Max to say anything. He continued with the same ranting tone, his eyes glazed over. “I’m about done with this garbage, the neighbors asking what Susan and I were fighting about and now this. You’d think people have never heard of arguments. You’d think people don’t even know what the hell discipline is anymore! No wonder everyone is turning their kids into such weak little fairies.”

Though he was obviously wrong, Max understood in a backwards way why Neil might think this was true. No one would’ve described Billy as a weak little fairy, and much of who Billy was on the outside _had_ come from Neil. The worst parts.

“Anyway, this call only confirmed what I was already thinking about,” Neil continued. “We moved to this shit-hole because of Billy, and not like that’s something we have to think about anymore.”

Max tensed up, waiting for Neil to lose it like he always did when he talked Billy, but he was too focused on what he was saying. _What was he saying?_ Max wasn’t sure she liked this sound of this.

“Susan, tell Max what we’ve decided on,” Neil commanded. He ran his fingers over his mustache.

The look on Susan’s face was one Max recognized very well, because Max looked the exact same way when she was struggling not to cry. Susan swallowed audibly, fingers tracing the fabric of her skirt. “Max…your stepfather thinks we should leave Hawkins.”

Max’s house keys made a clattering noise as they hit the wood floor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Even though this was around 4,000 words, it felt super short to me for some reason. Not really the most dramatic of chapters, but I guess they can't all be or Max would go off the deep end.
> 
> Rereading this on my phone I realized Max should’ve told the principal she was shopping with her mother and not seeing a movie, but if you read this before I (or if I don’t) fix that part just pretend she messed up not me haha


	10. Wonder Woman

_“No!”_ Max amazed herself with the uninhibited strength in her own voice. The hand that had been hanging onto her house keys was balled into a fist. She knew even as she said it that she’d probably regret it, but it hardly seemed to matter. What was the point of anything?

“Excuse me?” Neil didn’t yell, but his rage was clear. Susan said nothing. She should patent silence. “If you think my fourteen-year-old stepdaughter is going to decide what we do as a family, you are sorely mistaken.”

“I am not leaving Hawkins,” Max pushed, ears ringing. For the first time, she truly got how someone could be so angry that they’d hurt someone else. She’d been angry before, but never in this way, like nothing else mattered but her winning. What precisely she was trying to win, she didn’t really know. “You can leave, but I’m not.”

Neil rose from the couch. His expression was stony. He was staring at her like he’d never really _seen_ her before. “And where will go, Maxine?” His eyes flashed. “Will you go and live with one of your little friends? Because I hate to break it to you, but whatever kind of friendship you think you have, nobody wants you that much. _Trust_ me.”

Despite her own rage, Max sensed a little fear deep within herself. She wouldn’t let it rise, wouldn’t let herself step back from him. He didn’t get to do this. “My friends know me better than you ever will,” she said. “You wouldn’t get it. No one has ever loved _you_.”

Maybe she had a death wish. That was the only possible way she could be saying this stuff. Neil took another step towards her. She still didn’t step back.

“I know you’re angry, but you need to learn to control your emotions,” Neil said. Somehow, he got quieter rather than louder every time he spoke. “You don’t want to end up like Billy, do you?”

“Don’t talk about Billy!” Max’s voice broke, the words coming out more as a scream than as a statement. She wanted to hurt him, wanted to hit him like he hit her, wanted to smash his head on the wall. Her body wouldn’t move. _Always, always, scared of him, you stupid, fucking, loser-_

Neil pinned her against the wall, pinching her shoulders roughly. _Yeah, Steve, looks like calling you isn’t as easy as it sounds._ She held her breath, willing herself not to make a sound, not to whimper. Neil’s face was ugly up close, his eyes beady. He held her there and she clenched her jaw, bracing for whatever kind of impact was about to come.

“Neil, please, don’t hurt her.” Susan said it softly, without confidence, but the fact that she said it at all was so unexpected that Max let out her breath.

“Stay out of this, Susan,” Neil growled. He was plainly as surprised as Max, albeit in a bad way. His grip on her didn’t slacken at all, but he didn’t swing at her or move like he was going to.

“Neil, she’s just upset because she doesn’t want to leave her friends. This isn’t necessary, you really shouldn’t-”

“I said stay out of this.”

But the unthinkable was happening: Neil’s hands were relaxing, pulling away from her. She stayed frozen against the wall, not wanting to test the bounds of this strangeness. He held up his hand and she flinched, but he didn’t strike her, instead turning to point further into the house.

“Go to your bedroom,” he commanded. “You are going to stay there all night and think about how you are going to talk with respect the next time you get the urge to insert your opinion where it is not welcome.”

Max glanced at Susan, who seemed to have used up her current supply of courage, and hesitated.

“I said _go_.”

She went, flying across the house as fast as she could. She clicked the lock on her bedroom door and sunk to the floor, pulling her knees to her. She was trembling and sick to her stomach, but vaguely proud. She knew objectively that what she said to Neil made no difference, that he’d never really listen to anything she had to say. But it made a difference to her.

Then she remembered why she’d gotten so mad in the first place, and her pride melted away.

Leaving Hawkins. Moving. How could she have forgotten, even for three minutes?

She kicked her foot out in frustration, accidentally striking her bedpost. It was so unfair that she’d been protecting Neil from everyone to avoid having to leave, only for him to want to make her leave anyway. The fury she’d felt previously resurged. She got up and started pacing around her room.

Max’s alarm clock showed that it was only just now four. There was no way she was staying in this room until tomorrow morning. She couldn’t just leave now, though. Neil had never caught her sneaking out, but given how little he thought of her as a person it wasn’t out of the question that he’d check on her once or twice to make sure she wasn’t doing something she shouldn’t. What she should possibly do wrong confined to her bedroom, she couldn’t imagine. She wished she could; it was terribly boring to be trapped like this.

A few hours passed. Max spent them mainly brooding about the concept of leaving Hawkins, old Wonder Woman comics open on her lap but effectively unread. She heard Neil walk past her door a few times, as if he thought he could telepathically sense what she was doing, but he never knocked nor spoke to her through the door. She sat very still each time, doing her best to scope out whether her ability to sneak out was on his radar. But even when she was positive she was being totally silent, he didn’t try to enter.

Max had decided to wait until eight to sneak out, because that way Lucas would probably be home and finished with dinner. She wanted to tell him first what Neil had said. Although she’d initially only thought of moving as leaving her friends behind, with extensive time to consider every angle she’d come to recognize that her friends might see it as a reason to go to the police; if she left Hawkins with Neil, she’d logically be without their help. Lucas would certainly share this viewpoint with them, but he was better at listening to what she had to say than the others, especially Steve, who practically wanted Neil dead.

At eight o’clock, Max picked up the phone on her dresser and tiptoed to the corner of her room from where she usually called El. She dialed each digit of the Sinclairs’ phone number slowly, pushing very lightly on the buttons with her pointer finger. She covered the top of the phone as it rang, stifling the sound.

Unlike the Wheelers, the Sinclairs had caller ID, which meant it was Lucas who answered instead of one of his parents. “Max, did something happen?” God, people always assumed the worst.

“Shhh, I don’t want anyone to hear me calling,” Max whispered, ignoring his query. By _anyone_ , she obviously meant Neil. “I’m fine, but I want to talk to you. Can you meet me outside your house in twenty minutes?”

“What? You’re coming here?” He lowered his voice to match her volume level. “Isn’t it too dark?”

“I think I’ll live.”

“Okay, but what am I supposed to tell my parents?”

“You’ll think of something. Bye.”

Max gingerly hung up the phone and carried it back to her dresser. She put on her shoes and pulled a jacket on over her sweatshirt. She was an expert at opening her window without anyone hearing, and she lifted it up now, swinging one leg over the windowsill and settling herself delicately on the small structure below it. Keeping her weight concentrated in her bent knees, she closed the window nearly all the way, leaving an inch of room that she could use to sneak back in later. Gearing herself up, she put one hand where her feet were resting and used it to support her jump, landing neatly on the grass below her window.

Not about to get caught before she even got started, Max sprinted to where she’d abandoned her skateboard, closer to the front of the house. She picked it up and ran to the end of the street on foot before setting it down and getting on; wheels were noisy.

The ride to Lucas’s in the pitch dark was a bit eery if she was being honest. Not all the streets were well lit, and more houses were mostly dark than at six or seven because so many families in Hawkins had small children. Max almost fell more than once, noticing a branch or a rock seconds before hitting it and swerving just in time.

She was deeply relieved when she was stopped in front of Lucas’s house. She didn’t see him, but had no way of checking the time to see if she was early or if he was late. She hoped he hadn’t been forbidden from leaving, because he wasn’t good at sneaking out. In his defense, his bedroom was on the second floor.

Easily five minutes went by before Max heard Lucas’s front door open and she saw him appear, his face illuminated by the porch light. She waited for him to reach her, the path from his door to the street extremely long.

“Let’s go to the power lines,” she told him when he was close enough that he could hear her without her having to raise her voice. She’d had plenty of time to think of where they should talk.

He gave her a weird look, but she looked back at him insistently. “Um, okay,” he said, following her as she started walking in the direction of Mike’s house, which was closest to the power lines.

“What was so important that you couldn’t wait until school?” Lucas asked, trotting to keep up with Max’s determined steps. “Did you stop your stepdad from getting the call? Shit, were you too late? Was he mad? Was he glad you lied for him?”

“Lucas, shut up for a minute!” She didn’t want to talk until they were sitting down, away from potential eavesdroppers. She knew she was being paranoid, but her stomach was knotted up from spending the past four hours thinking about leaving Hawkins. They were halfway up the hill that led to the power lines, the darkness growing more intense as they left behind the street lights of the cul-de-sac. Max clutched her skateboard to her chest, squinting at the ground to ensure she didn’t misstep and fall down.

Lucas obeyed and stayed silent, also watching his footing on the very steep and very dark ground. When they reached the chain link fence that ran along the top of the hill under the power lines, Max stopped and sat down on the grass, leaning her back against the fence. Lucas joined her, twisting slightly so they were face to face.

“The principal did call my stepdad,” Max began, shredding blades of grass with her fingers. “He was mad, but not at me. Like…at the world, I guess.”

“So he didn’t get mad at you?”

“Not because of that. But he said he thinks everyone here is nosy and stuff, and that pissed him off.”

“Well, he’s not entirely wrong about people being nosy,” Lucas pointed out, his teeth glowing in the darkness when he smiled. “But who cares if he doesn’t like the people here? We don’t like him either.”

Max paused, sprinkling dead grass onto her lap. It was so quiet up here; there weren’t even owls in the background. “He said he wanted to leave Hawkins,” she said. “Like move away.”

Lucas sucked his breath in. Max continued to look at her lap, shredding more grass. “Oh my God,” he said after a moment. It was louder than a whisper but not a properly formed remark, the words running together. She lifted her chin, making eye contact with him. His expression was exactly what hers must have been when she’d first heard the news three hours ago: absolutely horrified.

“Yeah.” She sighed. Part of her had hoped that Lucas would have an instant solution to the problem, but if he did he wasn’t being very forthcoming. “It’s total crap. But, well, he always gets his way, so…”

“No way!” Lucas exclaimed. “He’s not getting his way this time! Do you seriously think we’re going to let you move out of Hawkins with that monster?”

“Pretty sure your slingshot won’t work on him,” Max said dryly. What Lucas said wasn’t meaningless to her, though. She wanted to be told that Neil was wrong, that no matter what her friends would be here for her, in _Hawkins_.

“I bet Steve’s bat would,” Lucas responded. He grabbed her hand, which was busily tearing up the grass. “It’s not gonna happen, okay?”

She wanted to believe him so badly that she allowed herself to. “Okay.”

Lucas scooted closer, his knees bumping hers. She hesitated, glanced at him, and then slowly laid her head on his shoulder. It was a bit bony but sturdy. Reassuring. If only life were like this all the time.

“What did you say when he said he wanted to move?” Lucas asked, resting his head against hers.

Her shining moment. She’d nearly forgotten. “I told him ‘no,’” Max said, smiling to herself. “I told him I wasn’t leaving, and my friends knew me better than him, and he didn’t understand because nobody’d ever loved him.”

“Holy shit, are you serious?” Lucas sounded beyond impressed, which Max felt she deserved. “That’s so badass, what the hell!”

Max laughed, then stopped, the rest of the memory playing out in her mind’s eye. “He got so mad, but my mom told him not to do anything to me and he didn’t. She’s never done that before. It was cool.” She didn’t know how else to describe it.

Lucas held tighter to her hand. “Maybe she really will leave him, Max. I know you don’t think she will, but you never know.”

Max’s conversation with her mother that morning had been very discouraging, but Susan telling Neil not to hurt her did feel major. “I hope so,” she settled on saying. Hope could be dangerous, so she was risking something having it about such a complicated matter. But it seemed like the right thing to do, meeting Lucas halfway.

Unlike Max, Lucas had a watch. He’d told his parents he’d gone to Mike’s and would be home by nine, so their time ran short fairly quickly. They walked more slowly on the way down the hill, the chances of falling much higher. Back in the cul-de-sac, they halted to say goodbye.

“My dad can drive you home,” Lucas offered. “I can tell him you were at Mike’s, too.”

She shook her head. It was deeply unfortunate that she had to skateboard all the way home, but she didn’t want to give the Sinclairs yet another opportunity to question her mugging story and feel sorry for her. “It’s not that far, not a big deal. Gotta be stealthy like Steve.” She climbed on her board. “Bye.”

“Bye, Max.”

Lucas watched her skate off; she felt his eyes on her all the way out of the cul-de-sac. It was oddly lonely once she’d skated past where he could see her.

Lost in thought, the ride home seemed to go by much faster than the ride there. Entire houses were dark now, causing her to remark how boring the lives of most people in Hawkins must be. No wonder they were so nosy, according to Neil.

Like before, she got off her skateboard at the end of her street and walked the rest of the way. She hadn’t thought much about Neil catching her having snuck out, but as it always did when she snuck out, the worry creeped up on her the closer she got to her window. She left her skateboard at the base of the window and pushed up onto the structure that sat underneath it. She reached forward to push the window up, then froze.

The window was shut.

All the air in her lungs went ice cold. She pondered wildly if the wind could have blown it shut, but there was no wind tonight. She pulled frantically at the closed window. It didn’t budge. It was locked.

Suddenly, the lamp in her room switched on, basking her in golden light. She almost fell off the structure.

Neil was standing in front of her, on the other side of the window.

She hardly had time to remove her hands from the window before he jerked it upwards from inside. He seized her by the wrist and tugged, sending her half-tumbling into the bedroom, scrambling to catch herself. She stumbled backwards onto her bed.

“I had no idea just how much trouble you were willing to cause,” Neil said. She had to strain to hear him, that’s how low his voice was. “Your mother went to bed early, so let’s try not to wake her up, okay?”

Okay with Max. She judged the distance to the phone, wondering if this was again one of the times when she was supposed to call Steve. They really hadn’t thought through how she was supposed to subtly place a call and get out of the house during a showdown with Neil.

“I have no words to express how disappointed I am in you, Maxine,” Neil went on. “Maybe it somehow wasn’t clear to you that staying in your room all night meant _staying in your room all night._ Or maybe sneaking out like this is a frequent habit of yours that I have somehow managed to overlook. Whatever it may be, you can believe me when I say this…”

He kneeled down so he was at eye level with her, dangerously still.

“…if you ever, _ever_ sneak out of this bedroom again, you will regret it more than you have ever regretted anything in your entire, short life. That bruise on your face will be a dream compared to what I will do to you. Do you understand?”

She was nodding so vigorously that even she believed herself.

Neil stood back up, his gaze hovering over her bed. It was still covered in her Wonder Woman comics, which she hadn’t cleaned up.

“What is this bullshit?” he said, walking around the bed to pick one up. Max recognized it as the first one she’d ever showed El. It was her favorite.

He fanned through the pages, not really looking at them. “Looks like these comics have got you thinking you’re some kind of superhero.”

Max pleaded with the universe for him to put down her precious comic book and leave. He finished fanning through it and shut it carelessly, a few of the pages crumpling together. Her heart rate sped up.

Then he ripped it. Large hands on either end of the thin paper comic book, he pulled, the plasticky paper tearing in half, a perfect rip down the middle. Tears filled Max’s eyes as he threw it onto the bed, strips of paper flying out of the folds of the comic.

“Get rid of this garbage or I will,” Neil said. He whirled around in place and marched out of her room, shutting her bedroom door with a gentleness she didn’t know he was capable of. He was serious about not waking her mother.

Max rushed to her comic book, collecting the loose papers in a heap. She gathered the rest of her comics into a neat pile, returning them to the box where they belonged. She knew it was irrational, but him ripping that comic book felt like someone had ripped out her own heart. All of them were important to her, but _that one_ especially. It was one of the best things she owned.

For the second time that night, she carried the telephone from her dresser to the corner of her room. She didn’t know it was possible to be quieter than she had been when calling Lucas, but she made precisely no noise while dialing Steve’s phone number. She repeated the numbers in her head as she dialed; he’d drilled the number into her until it had cemented itself in her mind in the form of a weird, made up chant.

She knew Steve was going to think she was in serious danger, but somehow this felt even more pressing than if she were. She heard the click of the phone being answered and spoke before he could, whispering, “Steve, it’s Max, I’m not about to die or anything but I have to ask you a favor.”

“Do you need me to come get you?” He whispered without having to be told. She appreciated this.

“Not come get me but…come. Can you come? You’re going think I’ve lost it, but it’s important to me so don’t be rude about it, okay?”

“Do you hear me being rude?” She rolled her eyes; she hadn’t even told him why he was coming so he had no reason to be rude yet. “I’ll be there in five minutes.”

“Park a little bit before you get to my house,” Max told him, formulating a plan. “And then come to my window. It’s the the one on the side of the house with the little shed for firewood under it. Got it?”

“Uh…yeah? Are you sure you’re safe?” Fair enough question, the instructions were a bit odd.

“ _Yes_ , it’s about something else. You’ll see. Just come. Thank you! Bye.”

On the clock, it was seven minutes before Steve appeared at her bedroom window. Max lifted her box of comics and carried it over to the window, opening it.

“Hi-” He began, but she held a finger to her lips.

“Take these, please,” she said, hoisting the box onto the windowsill. He looked into the box, clearly confused. “This is why I said not to be rude,” she added. “Yes, they are comic books, and yes I called you here specifically to take them.”

He looked at her like she was insane, but took the box. “Any particular reason, or-”

“He tore one up,” she explained, glancing back and forth between her bedroom door and the window frantically. Steve being here wasn’t a good idea. “Just keep them safe, okay? You should go, before…you know.”

Steve looked past her, into her room. “You cannot keep living here, this is crazy,” he whispered, more to himself than to Max. She didn’t argue but started to shut the window. He took the hint and backed up, her box of comic books secure in his arms. She waved and mouthed _thanks_ before drawing the curtains.

Max didn’t relax until she was in her pajamas in bed, the light turned off. Her stomach growled loudly. She felt nauseated from hunger, not having eaten since lunchtime. She should’ve asked Steve to bring her food. She guessed the fact that she’d been refused dinner would’ve worried him more anyway, so it was probably for the best that she hadn’t. She tossed and turned in her sheets, unable to get comfortable. She’d been stealing Aspirins from the bathroom medicine cabinet, her own bottle stolen, so that was yet another thing she hadn’t had in hours. Her side and shoulder ached.

Max was about ready to give up trying to sleep when she drifted off, two hours before her alarm was set to go off. Her hunger had subsided and been replaced with a weak emptiness that deadened her enough to sink into a shallow state of sleep.

When she woke up to the blaring of her alarm, she felt like someone had run her over with a truck. She wasn’t sure how much longer she could live like this before she had a nervous breakdown.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really wanted Neil to get stood up to finally because screw him.
> 
> I finally have an extremely clear plan for the rest of this story! It's seriously gone totally differently than I thought it would when I started this...like a week ago. I can't believe it's only been that long wth.
> 
> Side note but happy birthday to Sadie Sink my fave


	11. Poltergeist

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for abuse again.

**November 18, 1985**

Though Max had heard nothing about realtors or looking at houses elsewhere, Neil had spent the past week fixing up the house “to sell.” Considering they’d only moved into it a year ago, there wasn’t much in the way of big projects to do. But every day when Max returned home, she found him engaged in some strange project, like washing the front door or changing the master bedroom’s doorknob. He didn’t ask Max to help him and she didn’t offer to. For the most part, he ignored her existence, as if his working in front of her was a silent punishment in the form of reminding her they were moving.

Mike and Dustin had wholeheartedly shared in Lucas’s sentiment that she was _not_ moving, whatever Neil said. When she’d told Steve, he had gone a step further, saying if she was worried about it, he’d run Neil over with his car should he try to take her away from Hawkins. She knew he was kidding, but the meaning stuck. Neil’s work on the house made her apprehensive but didn’t impose on her ability to live her life. She was used to him imposing on her ability to live her life, so the current state of affairs was bearable.

It was Monday evening. Dustin’s VHS of _Ghostbusters_ was overdue at the video store because the rest of them had pressured him to keep it out so they could watch it a second time (or a third, since they’d all seen it before). He’d obliged, but insisted they go directly to return it after watching it, hoping Steve would cut him slack on the overdue fee.

Max skated along ahead of her friends’ bikes, the crisp air fresh on her face. Her bruises were fading. She’d even stopped taking so much Aspirin, which Dustin had told her could cause internal bleeding. She did enough of the external version.

Family Video was next to the Palace Arcade, and the second most-frequented business by the Party. Steve was usually there when they went because he worked full time. Robin was part time, but worked most afternoons. The boys locked up their bikes outside the store but Max just picked up her skateboard, carrying it inside with her.

Dustin immediately went to the counter and started arguing with Steve about what “due November 18” meant. Max and the others went to the shelves, pouring over the options for their next movie. Max noticed _The Karate Kid_ on the shelf and smiled. She’d promised El they would watch it together over Thanksgiving, which was fast approaching. She was excited, to say the least.

“I’m just saying, ‘due November 18’ implies that it is okay to return the movie _on_ November 18, not before, _on_ -” Dustin was saying, loud enough to attract the attention of multiple customers in the store. Max, Lucas, and Mike went up to the counter to join him, interested to see how this played out.

“Okay, be quieter because people are looking at you, jeez,” Steve muttered in response. “If you had such a problem with the rental terms _explicitly stated_ at the front of the store, why didn’t you say anything before now, huh? Oh yeah, because only now is your movie overdue.”

“Kind of impressive he’s gone this long,” Max interjected. Dustin nodded in agreement, even though her comment wasn’t quite in his defense.

“Whatever, fine.” Steve took the movie from Dustin. “But if you tell anyone I did this for you, you’re dead.”

Dustin grinned and high-fived Max, who raised her eyebrows at his hand but indulged in the high-five.

They spread out through the store again. The first to find a movie they all agreed upon didn’t have to contribute in paying for it. It was the longstanding policy of their Party, but in actuality Dustin always rented the movie in his name and paid for the majority of it. Max didn’t really know why, it was just like that.

Mike finally selected a movie and called them over: _Poltergeist_.

“Nah, we already saw that,” Lucas said. Max herself had seen it in the movie theater with her dad, about six hundred million years ago. Susan had forbidden her from seeing it, so it had been the first thing she asked to do when she was dropped off at her dad’s apartment.

“Not in years,” Mike protested. “Come on, it’ll be fun to watch tomorrow night.”

They went back and forth, bickering, until Max snatched the movie from Mike and headed to the counter with it. They jogged after her, now complaining that she hadn’t let them finish their discussion. She set the movie down in front of Steve, blowing them off.

Steve shrugged, like she could set _The Care Bears Movie_ down in front of him and he’d just run the charge.

“Wait, we haven’t decided yet!” Lucas said. “There could be something better!”

“You guys come to this damn video store twice a week,” Steve said, already filling out the rental slip. Lucas groaned, exasperated.

“It’s gonna be okay, Lucas,” Max said, laughing at the look on his face.

“Yeah? Traitor-”

He was cut off by a deep, heavy voice resounding through the store from the door. “Well, isn’t this a nice surprise.”

Max’s jaw physically dropped. Neil stood at the front of the store in his work clothes, holding a shopping bag. He looked so out of place in the messy video store that a few other customers turned to glance at him. It was probably really because he was being loud, he did look weird.

Realizing that her friends were all staring at her, Max straightened her posture and managed a “Hi.” Neil crossed the store to stand about two feet in front of her. Lucas and Mike were sandwiched on either side of her, Dustin beside Mike. Steve, of course, was behind the counter. Their presence motivated her to speak more boldly; if it was because they made her feel safe or because she didn’t want to look weak in front of them, she didn’t know. “What are you doing here?” She asked, voice steady.

“I was just at the hardware store,” he answered. Her eyes flickered to the shopping bag he was holding. Sure enough, it was from the hardware store. “I saw the arcade sign and remembered how you and your little friends love to spend time there.” His expression suggested he didn’t approve of this activity. “I thought I’d drop by as a…well, as a surprise.” He smiled a smile that didn’t reach his eyes, clearly for the benefit of her friends. If only he knew the things they knew about him.

“We’re not at the arcade,” Max said, the first thing she thought of. _What a brilliant remark, Max_.

“I saw you and your friends through the window,” Neil responded, still smiling. “Looks like you’re having a nice time.”

Max glanced back at Steve, who was holding the copy of _Poltergeist_. She couldn’t tell what was going through his head as he stared at Neil. She prayed her friends would hold it together. The last thing she needed was Neil wondering why her friends hated him so much.

She chewed her lip. “We are.” There had to be something else; Neil wouldn’t drop by just because.

“Ah, well, I’ll be sorry to break it up then,” he said, not looking sorry at all. “I’d like you to come home with me.” Of course he would. The way he phrased it annoyed her. If he meant “come home with me or I’ll kill you,” which he did, he should just come right out and say it. Not like he would in public.

Max felt Lucas and Mike grow tense on either side of her. There was no world in which this wouldn’t end with her going home with Neil, so objectively she should just agree and leave. But a small part of her didn’t want them to know how much control he had over her, how submissive she was when it came to him. It was humiliating.

She tucked a strand of loose hair from one of her braids behind her ear. “I’d rather stay a little longer.” There was no determination whatsoever in her tone, but the words were enough to be daring. She was being an idiot and she knew it.

“Funny, I don’t remember asking.” Neil laughed like he was joking, but his steely gaze said otherwise. It was time to go.

“Come on, just let her hang out with her friends for a while longer,” Steve spoke up from behind Max. She glanced back at him again. There was the determination in his face that she had not been able to conjure in her own. She gulped, unsure this was a good idea. No, positive it wasn’t.

“I definitely don’t remember asking the guy who makes minimum wage working at this place,” Neil laughed again, this time with even less care about the laughter’s believability. “Max, we’re leaving.”

At least he didn’t know that Max knew Steve. But then Neil tilted his head, recognition registering on his face. “You were at my son’s funeral this summer. You think you’re friends with these kids or something?”

Steve wasn’t dumb. From behind her, he answered casually, “Ehhhh, they just come here to get videos. But they were just talking about how much they wanted to watch _Poltergeist_ tonight so, you know, no need to be a jerk and stop them.”

It was a mark of Lucas’s loyalty that he said confidently, “Yeah, we’ve really been looking forward to watching it.”

A vein rose in Neil’s forehead that didn’t go unnoticed by Max. She’d chewed her lip so much that it was bleeding. Neil squinted at Steve, ignoring Lucas entirely. “Who are you calling a jerk?” He said. To an outsider, it might not be obvious how mad he was, but to Max it was clear that he was pissed.

“Ah, just an expression,” Steve said. He didn’t seem remotely intimidated by Neil, which was impressive to Max. She wondered if Neil was inherently intimidating, or if she just thought so because of how he treated her. Steve’s casual air was plainly to keep Neil from blaming Max for what he was saying, not because he harbored any concern over what Neil thought of _him_.

Max was speechless. She felt the responsibility to fix this conversation, to go with Neil before things escalated, but yet she just stood there.

Mike was talking now, his shoulder even tenser than before. “Max, you left your bag at my house. You should go get it. Before you go home.”

It wasn’t a lie. Her school bag–still the uncomfortable messenger bag she’d been using since her backpack was stolen–was in Mike’s basement. It was actually a pretty good excuse to go back there, seeing as she needed it for school tomorrow.

Neil cleared his throat impatiently. “I’m sure you won’t mind bringing it to school for her tomorrow,” he said to Mike, which was ridiculous. Mike couldn’t bike to school with his backpack and her bag, too. It was awkward enough to skateboard with that bag.

“He really can’t-” Max started, but her voice dropped off when Neil held up his hand.

“We are leaving _now_ , Maxine.”

There was no room for argument. “You don’t have to bring my bag tomorrow, it’s okay,” she whispered to Mike, no idea why it was important to her that she told him that. She didn’t want her friends having to bend over backwards for her just because of Neil’s evilness.

“Max, I can bring it, it’s fine…” Mike looked horrified, as did Lucas and Dustin. They were all trying to hide it, but they weren’t exactly A-list actors.

Max stepped away from her safe spot against the counter. Her feet were hard to move, heavy like cinder blocks. She could practically hear her friends’ thoughts whirring, but they’d tried everything worth trying and the game was over. Not even Steve could do anything to stop Neil short of punching him in the face, which would only come back to her in the worst possible way. He must have known it because he didn’t say anything more. There was a loud sound of the VHS of _Poltergeist_ being slammed onto the counter, though.

When Max was close enough to him, Neil took her by the wrist, leading her to the exit. It was totally unnecessary; she was going with him anyway. But his anger was clear. She should have gone with him immediately. Why could she never make the right choices?

Neil was parked outside the video store. Seeing as he’d driven here, Max didn’t know why he’d brought his shopping bag from the hardware store inside. Maybe he thought it would make his story more credible. This suggested that that was all it was: a story. He’d fully intended on finding her and picking her up.

Max slumped into the passenger seat, scooting as far away from Neil as possible. She thought he might lecture her before driving, but he started the engine immediately and backed out of his parking spot.

“I lied when I said I just happened to see the arcade sign,” Neil said when they were out of the downtown area of Hawkins and driving along a tree-lined road towards the house. This elicited no reaction from Max. She already knew he’d been lying. “I was looking for you. Any guess as to why?”

Honestly, no. Max shook her head slightly. She was sitting so close to the window of the car that her braid tapped against it.

“I got another call from your school,” he elaborated.

That was weird; Max had not been called to the office since last week, nor been pressured by any teacher to talk about her injuries. As if he knew she was confused, he continued, “Just a followup call from your principal. Following up from her last bullshit call. But she said something that was interesting to me. She said that when you told her you were mugged, you said your backpack was stolen. And then I thought about it and realized I hadn’t seen you with your backpack in a while.”

Shit.

“So I called your mother,” he went on, like the level of detail in his story was of great importance, “and eventually she admitted that she’d driven you to Indianapolis on Saturday to see a movie with your friends. Which completely went against _everything_ I’ve ever taught her about discipline, but I digress. I asked her if you had your backpack with you, and she said that yes, you did, and it was very full, so she could understand why someone might want to steal it from you. And I thought, ‘why would Maxine need to take so much stuff with her to the movies?’”

He paused, but it wasn’t a pause like he wanted her to answer him. She couldn’t. She was silently marveling at his detective work, cursing her mother for tattling on her, and having a heart attack all at once.

“I came home early from work and sure enough, there was way less money in that little bank where you keep all your money. Which could only lead to one conclusion: that you were trying to go somewhere. Run away.”

 _Shit shit shit shit shit_. Max’s face was pressed to the window by this point, the closest she could come to physically leaving the car. They were driving up beside the house. She wished the video store was further away. Like four hundred miles further.

Neil turned off the ignition but didn’t move to leave the car yet. He leaned towards her, his breath nasty smelling. “It doesn’t surprise me that you didn’t succeed in running away,” he said softly. “Something like that takes ingenuity, which you lack. But apparently what you don’t lack is the urge to blab. Because the way your precious friends were treating me in that video store was not normal. You’d think, after all the stuff I’ve said about family matters staying family matters, you would understand it.”

Max was deeply nervous about how exposed the left side of her face was. His hand was reaching toward her. She closed her eyes.

Instead of hitting her, he seized her chin and turned her head to face him. “Go inside the house,” he growled. Her eyes were still shut, but she could feel how close he was to her. She found the door handle with her fingers and pulled, swinging the car door open. He released her chin and got out on the driver’s side. She contemplated running off down the street, but before she got the chance to seriously consider it he’d walked around the front of the car and grasped her forearm. His grip was the kind that left bruises.

Neil dragged Max to the front door, her hurrying to move so the pull on her arm wasn’t more than it needed to be. Fortunately, the street was devoid of people; this had to be quite a spectacle. He unlocked the front door with one hand, shoving her inside.

Susan was reading a book at the dining table. At the sound of the door slamming, she came scurrying into the living room, eyes wide. Her skin was pale. It was probably from Neil harassing her on the phone earlier. “Neil, Max, what-”

“Your daughter is a weak little girl who feels the need to involve people in our business,” Neil snapped. Susan winced, even more color leaving her cheeks. “I just wanted to talk about her obviously having tried to run away, and her friends started talking to me like I was holding a gun. I’m assuming you didn’t know about this?”

“No, of course not-”

“Well, Maxine?” He directed his attention at her. She was rubbing her forearm with her hand, trying to get rid of the ache that had settled in it. She shook her head randomly, not sure what she was even saying _no_ to. “Stop that bullshit, I know you told them things about me. So, what was it? Am I a domestic abuser now? Maybe a wife beater? Or a rapist?”

She continued to shake her head, tears clouding her vision. Even if she could get to the phone, even if she could call Steve, he was working. Not like she could even get out of the house. Neil was in front of the door. She hated herself for having been thankful that the bruises on her face were fading. Maybe if they were still brightly colored, Neil would go easier on her. Probably not, but there were zero odds of it now.

“I didn’t say anything to them,” she tried. The way she said it, she wouldn’t even believe herself.

“Save it. You’re delusional if you think the word of a bunch of kids makes a damn difference.” Neil was breathing hard. It occurred to Max that he might be legitimately worried about her having told on him. They both knew her friends’ word _could_ make a difference. Not to mention, Steve was technically an adult.

Susan crept forward, resting her hand on Max’s shoulder. Max flinched. “Max, honey, did you really tell-”

“Shut up, Susan, I am talking to her-”

“Don’t talk to my mom like that!” The hand on Max’s shoulder made her feel more connected to her mother. It was trembling; Susan was trembling. Max had never felt so protective of her.

“You have no business telling me what to do, young lady.” Neil’s tone didn’t permit any objections.

“Max, just be quiet,” Susan muttered.

“SHUT UP!” Neil roared. Susan’s hand quickly left Max’s shoulder. She was backing up. So much for her support. Max didn’t quite regret defending her, but almost.

Shockingly, Neil didn’t go to Max immediately. His movements were halting, focused. She was watching his face, which was why she didn’t notice him lifting a plate from the coffee table. Susan’s gasp from a fair distance behind her was what alerted her to it, seconds before Neil threw it.

Time slowed. The collision with Max’s shoulder hurt, causing her to stumble backwards from the momentum, but what hurt more was an instant later, when the plate struck the floor and shattered. The shards flew upwards, a few hitting her legs with their sharp edges. She felt the searing of cuts, at least two or three, but avoided looking down, like the remaining shards on the floor would defy gravity and float up to her face. Susan screamed.

“That the kind of shit you tell them I do?” Neil boomed. Max didn’t dare move, afraid she’d step on glass. Anyway, the glass around her was the perfect protective barrier.

She heard a beep. Twisting the upper half of her torso carefully, she saw Susan…at the phone. She was dialing a number that looked suspiciously like _9-1-1_.

“Mom, no!” Max exclaimed. She couldn’t explain it, couldn’t explain why those three numbers at the hands of her own mother curdled her blood. Everything else in her mind disappeared. All she knew was she had to stop her mother.

She swung her legs forward, kicking glass every which way, numb to the feel of it. “Mom, no, don’t-”

Neil lunged for her, grabbing her around the middle. It didn’t make sense; weren’t they united in stopping Susan from calling the police? Didn’t he _want_ her to stop it? The harder she struggled, the harder he squeezed. She could barely breathe, but wasn’t distinctly aware of it. She was only aware of her mother holding the receiver to her ear. “MOM-”

“He can’t keep doing this to you,” Susan said loudly. She was crying so _hard_ , holding that phone like it was her lifeline (which it was, Max later realized).

“Let me go!” Max screamed at Neil, at the world. She was choking, his fists lodged under her ribs. “Stop her, what the hell, stop her!”

It was like Neil hadn’t even registered what Susan was doing. It felt like four minutes had passed since Max saw her mother dialing the number, but from the way the phone just now started ringing, it must have only been tens of seconds. She knew he finally got what was happening when he let go of her. She fell down, coughing.

Neil closed the distance between himself and Susan, pulling the phone from her right as the voice of the dispatcher became audible through it. One hand roughly covering Susan’s mouth, the other holding the receiver to his ear, he spoke, saying, “I’m so sorry, my son accidentally dialed 911…”

Max remained on the floor, watching the scene as if separate from it. Susan could have fought Neil off, it was easy to see. She could have said something, anything, that would lead the dispatcher to believe he was lying. But she didn’t. Max didn’t understand her own feelings; moments ago she would have done anything to stop her mother from placing that call, now she was disappointed in her for not trying harder.

Neil hung up the phone. They were going to die, Max realized. This was it. They were going to die.

Knocking. Knocking was coming from somewhere. Had she lost her mind? No. The door. Knocking was coming from the door.

Neil didn’t hear it. He was fixated on Susan. Max noted vaguely that he had her pinned against the wall. She’d never seen him touch Susan like that before. It was Billy all over again. _Billy, god, if only Billy were here_ -

“Hands behind your head, step away from her.” Max spun her head around so quickly that she felt a jolt of nausea, dizzy.

Police.

There were police in her house, guns raised.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These scenes with Neil can be a little repetitive I know, but I swear this is the last one like this, and the most important one in my opinion. I had this planned out for a while so it's weird to finally write it and be publishing it.
> 
> Oh and if it wasn’t clear, someone else called the police, I know they don’t come that quickly!


	12. Police

Even though Max felt the wood floor under her hands and heard the shuffling sounds of the various policemen entering the house, it was like she wasn’t really there. Her eyes were seeing, but not processing in the way they normally did. It was like watching a movie as you drifted off to sleep.

Neil had put his hands behind his head. He was obeying, allowing himself to be handcuffed. His face was beat red, though; he was obviously livid. Max was intensely glad that he couldn’t blame her for calling the police, like that was what was important right now.

But who _had_ called them? Susan’s call hadn’t worked. Even if it had, this was too soon. That call was only seconds ago.

_Seconds ago. Was it really?_

Someone knelt down in front of Max. Another police officer. There were so many of them. Until today, she’d only ever thought about Hopper. She consciously knew there were other police officers in Hawkins, but she’d purposefully avoided finding out anything more about them. This one was a man in his mid-thirties. “Are you hurt?” He asked. His voice echoed in her ears. It took her a moment to comprehend that he expected her to respond.

“No,” she said. Was that true? She was in pain. Her legs hurt, from the glass. And she was still breathing shallowly; each breath burned a little. _Get it together, Max, Jesus_. She pushed herself up so that she was properly sitting on the floor.

“I need you to be calm,” the policeman said, which was kind of stupid. Max was being calm. She’d said one word. She wasn’t even crying. If anyone wasn’t being calm, it was her mother; Susan’s sobs were loud. The more Max listened to them, the harder it was to focus on anything else.

“We’re going to be taking your father into custody,” the policeman continued, his eyes searching her face like he had doubts as to whether or not she could hear him.

“Stepfather.” The reply was automatic.

“Oh, I’m sorry, step-”

“Yeah, and I don’t care where you take him. You can have him.” She looked right at the policeman as she said it. She _hated_ the way he was looking at her. These guys had it easy, coming into other people’s houses and acting like they understood everything about everyone inside. _She_ was the one who had been living with this shit for ages, but he had the audacity of looking at her like she was some weak little flower. So what if she was weak? He didn’t know her. He didn’t get to decide that.

“We’ll need you to come with us, too.”

No shit.

Despite all the words swarming her head, begging to be spoken, she struggled to form a coherent sentence. Eventually she just choked out, “Okay,” giving up.

She saw Neil walking out of the house, police in front of and behind him. If he resisted, if he refused to go, if he ran to her…well, nothing would happen. He wasn’t big enough to fight even two of these guys. He wasn’t that big in general. It was rare that Max saw him next to other grown men. She’d built him up as a monster in her head when loads of other people were objectively more frightening.

The policeman with Max got up and held his hand out to her to help her up. Instead of taking it, she got up on her own, stumbling slightly from the pain that settled through her leg as she put weight on it. The room spun but she balanced on her feet, trying not to look at anything in particular that might send her toppling; she didn’t want anyone to think she was seriously injured and take her to the hospital. Though she wasn’t fully in her right mind, she knew there were probably a million things about to happen in quick succession and she didn’t want to prolong them.

The Hargrove house was small but the living room seemed enormous as Max attempted to cross it. She remembered the broken plate at some point, mid-step, and worried that she’d not seen it and it was under her and she was going to cut herself. Although she recalled right after that the plate had been smashed at the other end of the room, the lapse caused her to trip, catching herself right before she went down. The sound had clearly alerted Susan to Max’s existence, because she came running to Max from where she stood being questioned by a different officer.

“Max, are you all right?” She gasped, agitated, giving Max an awkward side hug. Max opened her mouth to answer, but was cut off by one of the policemen, who was already gently pulling Susan off of her.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, but you can talk to your daughter afterwards. For now, we need all of you to come with us separately.”

Separately. Like they were accomplices in a crime and needed to be questioned without interference.

“She’s not a part of this,” Max said hurriedly. Clearly her story was going to be the most important because she was the child and children were always the innocent ones in adults’ eyes. “She tried to call the police, she was helping, she’s never touched me.” The speed at which she was talking grew faster and faster.

“We’re not saying she is, kid, it’s just the way we do things.” The policeman who had spoken to her mother had his hand on Susan’s arm.

Max rolled her eyes. _The way we do things_. Everything was always because of some kind of policy. It bothered her that there was an agenda for this. There shouldn’t be agendas when it came to ruining people’s lives. She was done talking.

She continued the journey to the front door, not stopping again until she was through the open door and standing on the porch. For some reason, she’d expected it to be bright outside, but the sun was setting. It was probably almost six. It had been not quite five when she and her friends had arrived at the video store.

There were three police cars parked back-to-back in front of the house. Max was surprised that it was only three. It had felt like there were so many policemen there, but now as she scanned the area she only counted six. Her policeman, the one that had called Neil her father, was still with her, gesturing for her to follow him down the porch steps. Her reaction time delayed, she started forward, lowering each foot to the step below with extreme care until she reached the bottom.

The policeman now indicated for her to get into one of the police cars, but her attention was diverted by the sight of Lucas, Mike, and Dustin standing halfway down the street with their bikes. She rubbed her eyes, wondering if she was hallucinating, but no. They were there, staring at her, far away like they didn’t think they belonged.

An intense emotion overtook her that she couldn’t identify. She didn’t know if they saw her looking at them; most likely they did, but they were too blurry to know for sure. Maybe something was wrong with her eyes.

“Excuse me,” Max said, turning back to the policeman who had probably been saying things to her this entire time. “Can I go talk to my friends? Really quickly.”

She pointed down the street at the Party so he wouldn’t think she’d lost it. He squinted at them like he was extremely confused at their presence. “You need to come to the police station,” he told her, meaning _no_ without actually saying the word. “Your friends will understand.”

Of course they’d understand. It wasn’t about that. “Please,” she begged, “just for five minutes.”

He pursed his lips, contemplating. Lowering his voice, he relented: “Two minutes. On the clock.”

She should have thanked him but forgot, taking off in the direction of her friends. They definitely saw her sprinting towards them because their lips were moving, talking. About her.

By the time she halted in front of them, her leg hurt so badly she could barely support it. She clenched her teeth together, attempting to deaden the pain before they noticed. She had one reason for needing to talk to them now, one thing to get clear in her two minutes of time.

“Was it you?” The words came out in between frantic breaths. Their facial expressions were fuzzy. Her eyes were working, but her brain was slow to decipher the images. They loomed in front of her two-dimensionally.

“Max, oh my GOD, are you oka-” Dustin’s voice.

“Was it you?” She asked again, interrupting Dustin, interrupting all three of them, because they were all talking over each other. She didn’t care what they were saying, it was white noise in the background of her mission.

“Max-”

“Holy shit-”

 _“Was it you?”_ She emphasized each word, the grammar of the whole question starting to sound off, like something Eleven might say.

“Sorry, was it us? Was what us?” Lucas reached out to touch her but she flinched away, immediately guilty at the hurt look on his face.

“Did you call them?” She held her voice steady. “Did you call the police?”

“Max…”

“Come on, I have two minutes to talk to you guys, did you?”

They all hesitated. She sighed. “Seriously-”

“It was Steve,” Mike confessed.

“Are you mad?” Dustin asked.

All three of them stared at her, waiting for her to explode or something, but she didn’t. She didn’t know if she was mad. She’d thought so, thought that was the emotion she’d felt so strongly a minute ago. But this was different, not out of control like anger. It was more like relief. A conflicted, troubled relief, but still relief in some form.

“Max, we had to,” Lucas said quietly. “We were so scared. We told Steve you’d be mad, but he said it didn’t matter.”

“I’m not mad.” She blinked at them. Their faces were less fuzzy now. She was calmer. She looked down at her feet before adding, “I think if Steve didn’t call them, it would be worse.”

“God, are you okay?” Mike looked down at the leg of her jeans, which was ripped and spotted with blood. She heard Lucas and Dustin inhale at the sight.

“It’s not that bad,” she said, meaning it honestly. So she’d been hit with a plate and cut with glass. So there were probably fist marks under her ribcage, too. She’d had worse done to her. She _would_ have had worse done to her if the police hadn’t come when they did. The police; it had definitely been two minutes. “I have to go.”

She backed up before turning around to complete the walk back to the police car. She wanted to fix her friends’ faces in her mind, remember there were good things and sanity outside of this mess.

The backseat of the police car was highly uncomfortable. Max cupped her hands together in her lap, pretending she didn’t notice the police officers continually glancing at her in the rearview mirror. She had begun to worry about what she was supposed to say when she was questioned. Would they put her in one of those rooms with a two-way mirror like on TV? She wished she’d had a chance to talk to her mother, to figure out whether they were playing the truth game or not.

She never thought she’d consider being truthful with the police, but the rules had changed. There was no denying what Neil was; the police had seen it, had kicked open the door into tangible evidence of it. Protecting Neil was aiding him in being set free, when he now knew she’d told her friends about him. Protecting Neil was no longer protecting herself.

Max hadn’t been to the police station before. It was small, small enough for this to be embarrassing. Neil had been driven off in another police car before her and he was nowhere to be seen. She was escorted inside and ushered into a small room with chairs on either side of a table. A policeman she’d not seen at the house followed her in, along with a blonde lady who wore too much red lipstick.

“Maxine Mayfield? How are you?” It was the woman that spoke, addressing Max in very much the same way as various adults had addressed her after the incident at Starcourt that summer.

Max didn’t correct the use of her full name. She just sat there in the hard plastic chair. She’d almost finished deciding to be honest about Neil, but she was busy fending off her own doubts.

“I know you’re in shock, but we do have some questions for you, if that’s okay.”

Was she in shock? She was aware of her surroundings, aware of sitting in this chair. Maybe she had been in shock, at the house, but she felt different now, more in control of herself. Then again, something was definitely off. Her literal worst fear–being at the police station being forced to talk about Neil–was being realized. Yet she was devoid of fear, devoid of any emotion at all. She was just here, sitting in this chair.

“Maxine, is it okay if-”

“Yeah. Questions. Go ahead.” She sat up straighter.

The policeman had a journal and a pen with him. He was already scribbling on the pages and she hadn’t even been asked a question yet. She adjusted her position again, attempting to look poised.

“We received multiple 911 calls regarding this incident,” the woman said. “The first was from someone who claimed to be a good friend of yours and knew about abuse going on in your home. He was concerned it was about to take place again. The second was from a neighbor, right after, saying they saw your stepfather, Neil Hargrove, drag you into the house aggressively. Keeping in mind what we already know, can you please tell me truthfully if Neil Hargrove is abusive towards you and your mother?”

Max wondered if this woman knew about her mother’s 911 call. Not like it mattered, she just wondered. She crossed her ankles and nodded slowly. “He hits me, yeah. Not my mom, except today. But he hit Billy, too. My brother. My step-brother. His son. Sorry.”

The policeman’s scribbling was annoying. Max did her best to ignore it.

The woman frowned. “Your step-brother? Where is he right now?”

“Dead.” The word caught in Max’s throat. “He died in the summer, at the mall. That’s why…I mean, Neil started hitting me after he died. But he hit Billy his whole life. Nobody ever called the police on him for it or anything, but he hit Billy all the time.”

“I’m sorry about your stepbrother.” The woman sounded genuine, but it was difficult to tell with these people. “We’re going to be primarily talking about what’s happening to you and your mother, though, okay?”

In other words, Billy was dead so they didn’t care about him.

“Billy had it worse than me,” Max continued, desperate to explain. “He didn’t want anybody to help him, so I didn’t but…” Her voice trailed off. But Billy deserved this, more than her. Billy deserved to have Neil arrested, when he was alive. Whatever happened to Neil because of her, it wouldn’t be because of Billy. That wasn’t fair.

She was crying. She didn’t know when she’d started. So much for no emotions.

“Maxine, I know this is hard, I really do understand. But you say your stepbrother didn’t want anybody to help him? Do you wish he did?”

Max thought of Billy, with red marks on his face from Neil slapping him. Billy, who had once cried on the kitchen floor but yelled at Max to get away from him or he’d kill her. She’d given up on trying to help him before they’d even moved to Hawkins. He was Billy, who scared her friends and her, too. At the time, the thought that he might need help despite rejecting it so violently was absurd.

But yes. Yes, she wished somebody would have helped him.

“Maxine, if you do wish someone would have helped your stepbrother, then don’t be like him. Let us help you. Will you do that?”

Hadn’t she already decided she would? In the police car. She’d decided she wasn’t going to lie. What was she even doing?

Besides crying. Tears were running down her chin, dripping onto her legs.

“Yes,” she said, swallowing away the saltiness of the tears in her mouth. “Just ask me your questions.”

The whole thing took over an hour, despite the predictability of the questions. How often did the abuse happen? How badly did Neil hurt her? How many people knew about it? Had Neil hurt her today? Was that a bruise on her face, from him? Where else was there evidence? Could they take pictures of her injuries?

She agreed to everything, told them everything they wanted to know. The only place where she embellished was when it came to Susan’s passivity, telling them that Susan often spoke up, emphasizing that Susan had placed that 911 call, that she was afraid of Neil but loved Max dearly. It was probably obviously what Max was doing, but she was too tired to think heavily about it. When they finally asked if she had any questions of her own, she didn’t ask if she was going to be put into foster care. She didn’t want to know.

It was fully night when Max emerged from the room, the darkness outside making the yellow lights of the police station more luminous. She was told to wait there, that they were calling someone to come pick her up. They didn’t ask who she wanted them to call, they just informed her they were calling an emergency contact on her school paperwork. She had no idea who her mother had put down, considering Susan had almost no friends in Hawkins.

She got her answer when the front door of the police station burst open and Karen Wheeler rushed in, looking frazzled. Not Max’s first choice, but somehow better than Mrs. Sinclair. She didn’t want the Sinclairs’ perception of her affected by seeing her like this. She had to look awful, her face red and splotchy and her jeans ripped open. Fortunately, Mrs. Wheeler was too polite to comment.

Pretty soon after Mrs. Wheeler entered the police station, she was leaving again, Max in tow. Her car was parked at the front, and Max awkwardly waited at the passenger side for Mrs. Wheeler to unlock it.

“You’ll have to excuse how messy the car is, I was driving Holly’s friend home from a playdate,” Mrs. Wheeler said conversationally. Max appreciated how good Mrs. Wheeler was at the casualness, like she wholeheartedly believed it was possible to be casual in this situation.

Max responded vaguely that the car wasn’t even that messy, that it was fine, that she appreciated Mrs. Wheeler coming to get her.

“Of course, I came as soon as I got off the phone,” Mrs. Wheeler said. A bit of something other than casualness creeped into her voice there. “Mike and the others wanted to come but I wasn’t sure…I mean, I figured…I don’t know.” She laughed nervously.

Max didn’t know if she was thankful or not that Mrs. Wheeler hadn’t let them come. On one hand, she was glad to not have to deal with her friends right now. On the other, all she wanted to do was see them. “Are they all at your house?” She asked.

“Oh, yeah, I said Lucas and Dustin could stay. But if you want me to send them home, I will, I won’t tell them you said so.”

“No, that’s okay.” Max decided her desire to see them outweighed her nervousness at doing so.

“Okay. And I was thinking you could sleep in the basement, sound good?”

 _Sleep?_ Max hadn’t thought that far ahead. She’d assumed this arrangement was more of an hourly thing, until her mother was done being questioned and could come get her. She was dumb. Of course she wasn’t allowed to go home with her own mother right now. She nodded absently, ending the conversation.

Mrs. Wheeler parked the car in the Wheelers’ garage. The familiarity of the garage was comforting; the Wheeler house always provided a sense of security that Max certainly didn’t feel at her own house. As they headed into the main part of the house, Mrs. Wheeler noticed Max’s leg.

“Oh, no, you’re bleeding!” she exclaimed. That wasn’t true; Max had stopped bleeding a while ago. But it was hard to tell just from looking. “Come into the bathroom and I’ll clean that for you.”

The offer was kind and Max felt sort of bad for rejecting it, but her leg wasn’t her priority right now. She shook her head but smiled, hoping the smile would show gratefulness. “Are they in the basement?”

Mrs. Wheeler nodded, looking like she didn’t fully approve of Max’s choice but at least understood it.

Max left Mrs. Wheeler in the hall and made her way to the basement door, taking deep breaths to prepare herself. When she was relatively confident that her heart rate was normal, she pushed open the door and started down the stairs.

“Max!” Her friends heard her at the top of the stairs and were up off the couch before she got to the bottom.

Frighteningly, she felt her eyes growing wet again. Just by looking at them, her self control was dissipating. She didn’t know what to say, no longer armed with a specific question to ask them, a specific thing to discuss in a two minute period. There was an infinity of things to things to say and infinite amount of time, and she had no idea what to do.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m back.”

Then the tears were rolling down her cheeks in droves. Again. She willed herself to stop, not to freak them out, but they hadn’t freaked out at her crying when Billy died and they didn’t look like they were freaking out now.

Lucas hugged her first. She didn’t expect him to do it, but his arms locked behind her and she didn’t flinch, didn’t resist, didn’t tell him it was okay. On the contrary, it was him telling _her_ it was okay, over and over again until it wasn’t quite English but a mantra that lodged itself in her heart and drew out more tears.

Mike and Dustin came next, closing the remaining space around her, surrounding her. They clung to her like they’d truly believed they might lose her. The idea was strange, but she remembered that she herself had been convinced Neil was going to kill her, back at the house. Not just today, but so many times before. And not just her, but Billy, too.

They didn’t let go of her for several minutes, until Max had practically run out of tears. They all went over to the couch, dropping into their usual TV spots but facing each other instead of the TV.

“Tell us everything,” Lucas begged from his spot next to her.

“Start with the second you left the video store,” Mike agreed.

The whole time she was talking, about ten minutes in total, all three of them listened intently and without interruption. She told them how Neil knew she’d run away and told her friends things about him, how pissed he was, how he’d thrown a plate at her and Susan had tried to call 911, how she’d tried to stop her, how the police had come anyway and she’d been questioned and photographed and she had no idea what was going to happen to her.

“If they take your stepdad to prison, can’t you just go back to your mom?” Mike questioned. A good question, but one that assumed things were logical when it came to the law.

“Sometimes the police are full of shit, though,” Dustin objected, clearly possessing a better understanding than Mike.

“Yeah, they’re usually full of shit,” Max said bitterly. It was probably unfair, given that at this point the police might save her from Neil, but there were too many things about them that frustrated her. “I’m just not going to worry about it anymore. Come on, let’s do something. Let’s watch _Poltergeist_.” She smiled at Lucas. “Your favorite.”

“Hey, I never said I didn’t like it,” he protested, “I just said we’d seen it before.”

“Yeah, okay,” she said, exchanging a look with Mike, for once on his side. She leaned forward to grab the VHS off the floor and her bloody jeans leg caught her eye. “Hang on, I should go wash this stupid cut, I’ll be back.”

“You sure you’re okay?” Lucas said, squinting at her leg.

“Yeah.”

She was on her way to the little basement bathroom when the basement door at the top of the stairs swung open, Mrs. Wheeler appearing in the doorway. “Max, your mother’s on the phone!” She called down.

A little anxiety found its way into Max’s chest, but she glanced at Lucas and relaxed at his encouraging expression. She trotted over to the phone and lifted it to her ear.

“Mom?”

“Max, oh my god. They told me they sent you to the Wheelers!”

“They did. Where are you?” Max didn’t know what happened to people in her mother’s situation. Would they let her go home?

“I’m at home,” Susan confirmed. “They said you can come back here tomorrow. You can stay here until the trial.”

“The trial?” Max felt suddenly out of the loop of her own life.

“Yes, the trial, honey. If we win…I mean, if Neil loses…they’ll send him to jail. I know it’s a lot, I don’t really get it all either, but they told me he could go away for a few years.”

Years. Max only needed four.

Or not even, if…

“Mom,” she whispered, feeling shy, “are you going to leave him? Like, even if he wins, even if they let him go…are you going to stay with him?”

There was a pause. Max held her breath.

When Susan spoke, it was with a conviction Max had not heard since she was a small child. “No, honey, I’m not going to stay with him. Okay? I’m not going to stay with him.”

Max exhaled. “Does that mean I can stay with you? If he’s gone? Does that mean I can stay in Hawkins with you?”

Another pause.

“I don’t know, Max,” Susan said softly, the conviction in her tone remaining but no longer reassuring. “They told me they were probably going to send you to LA.”

Oh.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for posting this a bit late again! I have spent so much time writing and editing and reworking this chapter that I have lost all concept of if it's good or not. At certain points I was frustrated writing it and at others I was like extremely sad which is weird for me when writing.
> 
> I always liked Billy but writing the part about him made me feel so intensely sad for him all of a sudden and now more than ever I'm like...why did he have to die when he did, god.
> 
> I SWEAR ELEVEN WILL APPEAR SOON and also Steve of course


	13. Truancy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay I am always annoyed when people say they hate their own writing because I think people should just own what they've written but...I honestly would not have posted this if I didn't feel this insurmountable pressure to post. It's so damn short because there was like 700 words more than I couldn't even bring myself to post because I just felt like it was terrible, plus even more that I had planned for this chapter and just got exhausted trying to fit in.
> 
> I know I am not selling this very well but please just think of this chapter as a little fluff/filler before the beginning of the ending of this story, I'm probably blowing it out of proportion anyway at least it features Steve and don't we all love Steve!

**November 19, 1985**

_Billy was bleeding. It was amazing that he wasn’t dead yet; Neil had already stabbed him like fifty times with one of the kitchen knives. Max stood frozen against the dining table. She tried to scream but her mouth wouldn’t open. She tried to run to the phone, but her legs wouldn’t move. She just had to stay there and watch Neil murder Billy-_

“Max, it’s time to get up.”

Mrs. Wheeler? Mrs. Wheeler. _Oh. Mrs. Wheeler._

Max was lying on the couch in the Wheelers’ basement, tangled up in the plethora of blankets that had been covering her when she went to bed last night. Mrs. Wheeler leaned over her, shaking her gently. Seeing that Max’s eyes were open, she stepped back. “Breakfast is upstairs whenever you’re ready,” she said.

Max sat up, nodding sleepily, mind still focused on her dream. The details were already slipping away, leaving her with nothing but a vague sensation of uneasiness. “I’ll come in a second.”

She watched as Mrs. Wheeler disappeared back up the basement stairs. Only when the door was shut did she lay back down, burying her face in her hands. The terror of the dream stuck with her until the memories of the previous day overtook them. Reality was scary, too.

She disentangled herself from the blankets, uncomfortably hot. Last night, she’d been freezing, taking so many blankets from the hall closet that Mike had made fun of her for it.

She’d borrowed pajamas from Nancy, but the only thing she had to change into was her clothes from yesterday. She hadn’t gotten is clear if she was expected to go to school today, but ideally Mrs. Wheeler would take pity on her and let her go home. Not only did she want to see her mother, but the thought of walking into school in the same thing she’d worn yesterday, jeans bloody, was enough to make her cringe inside. She wasn’t entirely immune to what other people thought of her.

The entire Wheeler family was at the table when she entered the kitchen. They all looked at her and then promptly looked away, plainly not wanting her to think they were staring at her. Which they were.

The spot next to Mike was open, obviously for her. She slid into it, feeling awkward at how they were all avoiding acknowledging her presence. Mrs. Wheeler pushed a plate of two Eggo waffles at her, smiling like this unhealthy breakfast was a mark of her coolness as a mother. Eggos were El’s thing, though, and Max wasn’t really a huge fan. She reached for the syrup anyway, hungry; the Wheelers had already had dinner when she got to their house last night, so she’d only had snacks while watching _Poltergeist_.

Max spent the entire breakfast arguing at a low volume with Mike about the quality of Eggos as a food. Mrs. Wheeler must have been watching the clock because at a seemingly random moment she gestured to it and rose from her chair. “It’s time for school.”

Max was intentionally slow about cleaning up her plate so she could talk to Mrs. Wheeler. She also hoped that cleaning up her own plate that might convince Mrs. Wheeler she was a good, honest girl who would never skip school just to skip school. “So, um,” she began, “I don’t have my skateboard, which is how I usually get home from school. And my jeans are kind of disgusting. I was just, like, _wondering_ if…”

Mrs. Wheeler’s eyes sparkled knowingly. “If you could skip school and go home?”

“Just to get my skateboard and change, then I’d go straight to school,” Max hastened to assure her. In reality she did not want to go to school even two hours late, but there wasn’t much to be done about that.

She expected Mrs. Wheeler to object on principal, but she didn’t. “I thought you might want to go home,” she said. “I can drive you there after I drop Holly off at kindergarten.”

Max thanked Mrs. Wheeler profusely.

It was weird to be going home and to be happy about it. The house didn’t look as foreboding when she knew Neil wasn’t inside, that hopefully he would never be there ever again. Of course, she might not either, in a few weeks. She’d been trying and failing not to obsess over the prospect of moving to LA.

Max waved to Mrs. Wheeler as she got out of the car and climbed the steps two at a time. She’d only knocked once when the front door swung open and she felt her mother’s arms around her. She hugged her back fiercely, relishing in the moment, praying it wasn’t the beginning of the end. When she pulled away, she somehow felt more anxious than before. With every reminder of the potential for good to come, her fear that the world would find a new way to fall apart intensified.

“You should really go to school,” Susan said, shutting the front door behind Max. “It’s not going to earn me points as a mother for my daughter to get a truancy charge.” It was phrased as a joke but there was darkness lingering underneath.

“I just had to get my skateboard.” Max was already searching for it. Her memories from the day before were hazy and did not include where she had left her skateboard. When Neil had dragged her into the house, where had she left it? She hadn’t. It must still be in his car. “Do you have the keys to Neil’s car?” She asked her mother. She didn’t want to mention him, didn’t want to have to picture his face in her mind.

Susan obviously shared in the desire to not discuss Neil’s existence until absolutely necessary. “I think the spare ones are in the kitchen,” she said vaguely.

Neil’s keys must be with him still. Or with the police, because they probably didn’t let him keep his keys in his pockets in jail. There were so many questions to ask about where he was and what was happening to him, but Max understood from the look on her mother’s face that this wasn’t the time. She noticed the broken glass was gone from the floor, another question she wasn’t permitted to ask.

Neil’s spare car keys were hidden in a bin of knickknacks on the edge of the kitchen counter. Max grabbed them by the keyring and tucked them into her sweatshirt pocket. Still feeling a bit out of place in her own house, she headed to her bedroom to change. It looked just how she’d left it, messy but simultaneously too clean. Her bed was unmade and there were shoes and papers on the floor, but everything she actually cared about was hidden away. Or gone, in the case of her Wonder Woman comics. She needed to get those back, especially if she was going to be packing up to go to Los Angeles. There they were again: the obsessive thoughts about moving that refused to leave her mind.

She changed out of her ripped up jeans but left on her hoodie, now not particularly caring if people judged her for wearing the same thing two days in a row. That was if she even went to school. She was dreading going more and more, the idea of skipping the entire day growing more and more reasonable. What was the worst that would happen if she skipped? All her teachers would understand. She had her doubts that it would infringe on her mother’s chances at winning her custody in the trial. Deep inside, she had her doubts that it even mattered what she did at this point; on the phone yesterday her mother had sounded pretty certain about LA.

Susan was sitting at the dining room table; she was always sitting at that table. She looked as unsettled as Max, like this house was full of ghosts and she was staying to prove to herself it was just her imagination. She had to be worrying about the future, too.

“I’m going to school,” Max told her. She’d left her school bag in her bedroom, but Susan didn’t notice, just smiled and waved at her. This was too easy.

Neil’s car was parked where he’d left it yesterday, on the street in front of the house. Max slid the key into the door and turned it, hearing the lock click. She opened the door and unlocked the rest of the car doors with the button on the inside. She spotted her skateboard on the passenger side of the car, on the floor. She didn’t really remember leaving it there, but she went around to the other side of the car and grabbed it, dropping it onto the cement. She locked the car from the inside, verified the car keys were back in her pocket, and took off down the street on her skateboard.

Max hadn’t predetermined her destination, but there was really only one place it made sense to go right now. She glided along the street effortlessly, feeling free. There was minimal wind to resist her movement, and at one point she had to be going over twelve miles per hour, her red hair fanning out behind her.

Max had never been to Family Video at this hour on a Tuesday morning. The parking lot was empty, and as far as she could tell, so was the store. Steve wasn’t at the counter but over by the shelves straightening the movies, visibly bored.

Skateboard tucked under her arm, she tiptoed over him and said his name loudly, hoping to startle him. But he barely jumped, looking at her like her being there was the only thing shocking to him.

“Holy shit, Max,” he said under his breath. He was scanning her like he was checking to see how many bruises she had. She was glad she’d changed out of her bloody jeans. “I was going to call your house later, what-” He didn’t finish his sentence, his eyes full of concern that she felt was somewhat misplaced. Whether or not she was fine, she looked it.

She didn’t quite know what to say that would convey what she wanted him to know. _Thank you_ wasn’t right. She was pretty sure she was thankful he’d called the police, but it wasn’t a simple thank you. She couldn’t pretend a small part of her wished he hadn’t. If he hadn’t, she wouldn’t be at risk of being taken away from her mother and her friends. But, true, if he hadn’t there would definitely be bruises for him to see, if she weren’t in a hospital or something. Like, dead.

“I’m glad…I mean, I think you did the right thing,” she said, holding her skateboard even closer to herself. “Calling the police,” she clarified.

“Hey, I usually do the right thing,” he said, causing her to smile slightly. “Are you okay? Nobody’s told me shit, I could barely sleep.”

She nodded. “It wasn’t that bad, like it was going to be but it wasn’t. They came before real shit went down.” Some piece of her was always going to wonder what would have happened if the police hadn’t come.

“Well, what’s your definition of not that bad?” Steve responded skeptically, like he already disagreed with her despite not knowing the story.

She swallowed. She didn’t want to talk about it, but thought he deserved it. “My stepdad just was really mad about me running away and…other stuff.” She didn’t want Steve to feel bad about making Neil suspect that she’d told. “He threw a plate at me and my mom tried to call the police herself. So I tried to stop her but he lost it and kind of suffocated me. Then he did stop her and pinned her to the wall? I think. But then the police came, so he didn’t get to do anything else.”

“Jesus, kid, you call that not that bad?”

The way he was looking at her made her feel terribly exposed. She shrugged, faking nonchalance, but her stomach twisted. “It sounds bad when you say it,” she admitted. It truly did sound worse than it had felt at the time.

“But you’re safe now, right? They took him somewhere?” Steve continued to look at her like she was text written in another language that he needed to translate.

“Yeah, I’m safe now.” Weird. She _was_ safe. She would go home today and not run into Neil. She would never again go home and face Neil, never have to brace for impact as his fists came down on her. She owed that to Steve. “Like I said, you did the right thing.”

“Technically, you said you _think_ I did the right thing,” Steve reminded her, “so have you made up your mind?” He was messing with her, but clearly also interested in her answer.

“Well, there’s this thing called custody,” she said, meaning to give a genuine explanation but it coming out sarcastic. “Police love to screw with it.”

There was no question that Steve knew exactly what she was saying before she said it. He rubbed his hand along the back of his head, sighing. “Fuck, kid, are you saying they want to take you away?”

Max couldn’t meet his eyes. “ _Send_ me away. To LA. To my dad.”

“God, I’m sorry. _God_ , what the hell.” He didn’t quite seem surprised, just pissed off on her behalf. “That’s where you were running away, wasn’t it? So at least, like…like your dad’s an okay person, right?”

Steve didn’t often talk about his own dad, but Max knew there was darkness in that subject. Not nearly at the level of Neil, but enough for Steve to overthink why she didn’t want to go LA.

“‘Okay person’ is a good way of saying it,” she responded, making a face. “Better than Neil. Better than foster care, so that’s why I was running away there. But not better than my mom, you know, when she’s not acting like a doormat. Not better than Hawkins.”

Steve sighed again, sounding frustrated with the entire world. “You’ve really been through some shit, you know that?”

She didn’t deny it.

“After all that, they should listen to you,” he continued exasperatedly, speaking like he had an audience bigger than just her. “Why can’t they just let you say you want to stay here and then you stay here? And for once you get something good.”

This sentiment both touched her and reminded her that he was still young from the naivety of it. Or maybe he knew what he was saying was unrealistic and just wished it weren’t. She understood that, too. “You didn’t listen to me when I said we shouldn’t do anything about Neil,” she pointed out, playing devil’s advocate. “You didn’t believe me when I said it was okay. So they think they’re being the same-”

“No need to tell me I’m a hypocrite,” Steve interrupted, but with a look of respect for her on his face. “I knew you were full of shit, and this time you won’t be, so if they’re smart they’ll see the difference, you hear me?”

She tilted her head at him. “Do you really believe that?”

He paused. “I believe you shouldn’t worry about it until you have to, okay?”

Good advice, but advice she was positive she wouldn’t be able to follow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I will probably come back and edit this chapter at some point but I knew if I didn't post what I had I was going to get frustrated, I'd rather start fresh on a new chapter with actually more fun content (the trial). Ahhhhhh why am I so stressed about a work of fanfiction good lord at myself
> 
> I may not post tomorrow and take a 1-2 day break, I have been devoting literally hours of my day every day to this story and today it really really stopped being fun to me. If you don't see an update for a day or two don't worry, I promise I will be back by Wednesday!!


	14. Destruction

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please forgive any inaccuracies in my writing about court etc, somewhere around the time I started watching Justin Bieber's arraignment on YouTube I realized I needed to get a life and just do my best. I have never even watched an episode of Judge Judy so let's hope Google did okay as my teacher haha.

**November 26, 1985**

Eleven was here. Here as in Hawkins. Here as in asleep next to Max.

The Byers had arrived around twelve hours ago, tired from the long drive but overjoyed at being back in Hawkins. Originally, they weren’t supposed to come until Wednesday, but they had a specific reason for coming when they did: Neil. His arraignment was scheduled for today, and Max had yet to go to sleep.

She kept looking at her alarm clock, expecting it to be later than it was. It felt like it had been two o’clock in the morning for hours, and only now was it 2:54. Her eyes ached from tiredness, but she couldn’t bring herself to sleep. Whenever she tried, she either failed or succeeded in the worst possible way. She was sick of seeing Neil in her dreams. Having him out of the house was supposed to get him away from her permanently, but now it was like he was glued to her, with her in places she used to escape from him to.

Max glanced at Eleven, sleeping so peacefully beside her. El coming back was the best thing that had happened all week. Or the best thing that had happened since October. Max was glad Joyce had said El could stay at her house instead of with the rest of the Byers at the Wheelers; part of her had worried Joyce would object to El being supervised only by Susan. Max had immediately been ashamed for thinking it, but the stress of the court determining whether or not her mother was a fit guardian was getting to her.

She rested back on her pillows, shutting her eyes resignedly. If she didn’t sleep, she’d look like a mess at the arraignment. And if she looked like a mess, it was just one more reason for them to hate her mother.

Despite Max’s commitment to it, sleep didn’t come. She felt suffocated by the blankets and kicked them off. Then she felt cold and pulled them back on. She tossed and turned, and then it was 3:54. Time only started to pass when she didn’t want it to. She had to get up in four hours.

She last remembered the clock saying 4:28 before she fell asleep, one leg inside the blankets and one out.

When she woke up, she felt more tired than she had before she went to sleep. El was poking her, hissing her name in her ear. She waved her hand wildly in El’s direction to stop her from poking her, the action giving her irrational anxiety she couldn’t explain.

“Max, time to get up,” El said the second Max made actual eye contact with her. “Eight-fifteen.”

8:15. Two hours and forty-five minutes before Max had to see Neil again. She rubbed her eyes, forcing herself to give up on not being tired. There was coffee. She hated coffee, but it existed, and she was going to have to choke it down.

She jumped off the bed, El doing the same in an identical way moments after. Susan smiled at them when they entered the kitchen, gesturing to the freezer. “We have Eggo waffles,” she said. What was it with mothers and Eggo waffles? The fact that her mother had bought them at the store meant something to her, though. Susan knew Max didn’t like them, so she had to have bought them just for El. Susan one week ago would definitely not have bought Eggo waffles at the store; Neil’s mere existence would have prevented that.

El eagerly opened the freezer and got out the box of waffles, putting them into the toaster. Max allowed her to add two more for her. She wasn’t hungry for anything, so eating Eggos wouldn’t make her any sicker than eating anything else. She walked casually to the coffee maker, eying her mother, and poured herself a large cup of coffee. Susan looked up pointedly at her as she took her first swallow, but said nothing. Today, drinking coffee made sense.

“When are we leaving?” Max asked, sitting down at the dining table with her coffee. El sat down next to her, holding two plates of Eggos. Max took one of them and picked up a waffle without bothering to add syrup.

“Well, we’re picking up Joyce at nine, so probably in around twenty-five minutes,” Susan said. “Does that work for you?”

Objectively, yes. Emotionally, Max would prefer to have a few hundred years extra to get ready.

After they’d finished their waffles, Max and El returned to Max’s room to get ready. Max wasn’t really sure what you were supposed to wear to an arraignment. Susan had already told her what to wear, but once she got dressed she felt absolutely ridiculous in the sweater and skirt she’d reluctantly agreed to wear. She hadn’t worn a skirt since Billy’s funeral, and that didn’t exactly bring up memories she wanted to be focused on today. Not like she hadn’t been focused on those memories to an obsessive degree for the past week.

El had brought a blue dress to wear, and Max wished she looked as put together as El did. Even after washing her face and fiercely combing her hair, Max felt like she looked half dead.

“We should go,” El said, tearing Max’s attention away from the bedroom mirror. “Eight forty-seven. It would be bad if you were late.”

Max nodded. “Yeah, it would be. Don’t want to get shut out of my own trial,” she joked, attempting to lighten her own mood. She succeeded in making El giggle slightly, but her own giggle hurt her face with the phoniness of it.

“Max…” El squinted her eyes, smile gone, understanding that Max wasn’t really in a joking mood. “Your stepdad, he’s going away. Bad man, I know, but now he gets locked up.”

If only it were that simple. El knew about LA, knew about what might be coming for Max, even shared her skepticism about the likelihood of good things coming from it. El understood how shifty the government could be better than anybody. But this…El couldn’t possibly understand why Max was so nervous about the arraignment.

The arraignment was separate from the custody issue. It was just where they’d hear Neil’s charges, find out if he pleaded guilty or not guilty. From El’s perspective, this was the beginning of the end of Neil. Max had already told El she wasn’t that nervous about what happened to Neil, because she wasn’t; she knew _something_ was going to happen to him, and he wasn’t getting back together with Susan regardless. Her anxiety surrounding this was different, indescribable. She didn’t want to see Neil, in handcuffs or otherwise. She didn’t want to hear the charges filed against him and remember why. She didn’t want to hear the charges filed and remember all the charges that _weren’t_ filed, all the things that didn’t matter to anybody but her.

Not able to put it into words, Max just nodded again. “Yeah, now he gets locked up.”

El held out her hand to Max, eyes still squinted at her. “I understand,” she said meaningfully, making Max think maybe she did.

In the car, Max and El took the backseat to leave the front for Joyce. Susan backed the car up slowly so as not to hit Neil’s car, which was still parked inconveniently in front of the house. Susan was scared to move it.

Joyce was standing outside the Wheelers’ house waiting for them to pick her up. Max spotted Steve in his car outside, waiting with Lucas and Dustin for Mike and Will. She waved through the car window, once again wondering if she’d made the right choice in letting them all come with her. She was glad to not be going into this alone, but hoped it wouldn’t be embarrassing. At least she had an hour and a half drive to get herself together.

It was strange to be making the same drive with her mother that she’d made a couple weeks ago. Max and her mother had never talked about that, never talked about Neil's revealing that she had tried to run away, but she guessed her mother was probably also thinking about it as they sped down the highway on the way to Indianapolis.

Joyce made small talk the whole drive, largely directed at Susan. Max was silent except when asked a direct question. She stared out the window, watching the trees go by until the green blurred into nothingness.

It was Joyce who got out the Thomas Guide this time, guiding Susan off the highway and through downtown Indianapolis until they were parked underneath the courthouse. The darkness of the parking garage was disconcerting, two stories under the street. They got out of the car, Joyce checking her watch and confirming to the rest of them that it was a little after 10:30. The arraignment was at eleven.

The four of them filed into the elevator, which was even more suffocating than the parking garage and smelled dirty. Max held onto the wall, feeling the sinking sensation of the elevator stopping more acutely than she normally did. The elevator opened into a vast but primarily empty lobby. There was a front desk, but because their presence at this particular stage in the trial process was technically optional, they didn’t check in. Instead, they stood off to the side, against the wall.Max scanned the lobby, searching it as if Neil might appear in front of her. Logically, she knew he would probably be escorted into the courtroom by guards or something, but the fact that he likely was somewhere in the courthouse with them was unsettling. She played with the sleeve of her sweater, wrapping a loose string around her finger and inadvertently lengthening it.

The third or fourth time the elevator opened after them, it was Steve and the rest of the Party. They were all dressed nicely, again in a way Max never saw them dress except at funerals. They came to stand with the others but didn’t say much because the lobby was largely quiet and anything they said might be disruptive. Given how serious everyone was acting, Max kept forgetting that all of this was because of her. It felt bigger than her, more important than anything she could be the cause of. She felt like she owed them something for coming, but couldn’t begin to think of what.

Someone had been paying more attention to their surroundings than Max, because all of a sudden they were moving forward down the long hallway, filing into one of the courtrooms. It was smaller than on TV, smaller than the courtrooms Max had seen on the reruns of _Perry Mason_ her mother used to watch. There were a few rows of seats for the public, and Max followed Susan to the front row, Lucas taking the seat next to her, El with Mike next to Lucas. The benches were hard, like church pews.

Despite the clock on the wall clearly showing that it was now after eleven, nothing happened for a while. Max shuffled her feet along the wood flooring, hands pinching the end of the bench. Her friends whispered back and forth amongst themselves but she didn’t join in the conversation, was only partially aware that they were having one at all.

The whispering stopped immediately when a different door opened and Neil was escorted in, his hands locked together in handcuffs. Max’s heart thudded, taking in the sight before she fully recognized what she was seeing.

Neil looked messy, a way Max had never seen him look. His mustache was overgrown and his expression was flat, sitting in a grey jumpsuit next to some kind of attorney. It was both reassuring to see him so defeated, and frightening to see him in handcuffs and a jumpsuit like he was a proper criminal. Max flattened her own expression, refusing to show emotion. She didn’t know what emotion to feel, so none seemed like the correct choice. She felt Lucas gazing at her but continued to stare forward.

The judge entered next, a man with a neat mustache and greying hair. He barely gave an indication of Neil’s being there. Max glanced around the room, uncomfortable with the fact that besides the people at the front of the room involved in the trial, her, her mother, and her friends were the only people there. It wasn’t like she expected anyone else to care about this case, but she felt like had the sensation of being on display.

This sensation increased when Neil finally looked over at her. This was the part she was afraid of, having to see him see _her_. She bit down on her lip and fought to not look away. She wasn’t the one in trouble, he was. He deserved to have her look at him with hatred. However, she wasn’t exactly able to conjure hatred; instead, her stomach flip-flopped. She averted her eyes just before Neil turned his head away from her.

“He looks like shit,” Lucas whispered to Max, his voice pulling her back to reality. “Jail doesn’t look good on him.”

She indulged the joke, raising her eyebrows and smiling halfheartedly. “You’re right, because jail looks good on most other people,” she whispered back.

“Well, it looks especially bad on him.”

“Everything does,” she responded darkly.

The hard bench was already hurting Max when the judge started speaking, reading off a document: “We are convened here today for the arraignment of Mr. Neil Hargrove. Mr. Hargrove, the charges against you are as follows: child abuse in the third degree concerning your stepdaughter, Maxine Mayfield, which is a class G felony, and domestic assault in the fourth degree concerning your wife, Susan Hargrove, which is a class A misdemeanor in the state of Indiana.”

Max was frozen in place, eyes flicking back and forth between the judge and Neil. Neil didn’t react to the charges being read aloud, as if he hadn’t even heard them. In a way, it made sense; Max was embarrassed to hear the charges read off with her name, to have people listening that knew this was about her. For Neil, the charges were being read off _to_ him. As bad as it was to be a victim, it was worse to be in handcuffs.

“…these charges were filed against you on the nineteenth of November, 1985,” the judge was saying, having read off numbers and addenda that Max did not understand. “These charges were filed on the basis of visual evidence recorded by the Hawkins Police, and in the case of the child abuse charge physical evidence and photographs of the victim, as well as testimonies from both victims.” He paused, turning a page on the document. “At this time, the court asks if the defendant pleads guilty, not guilty, or no contest.”

Here it was, the reason they had come. Dustin, who weirdly knew the most about the judicial system, had explained to Max that if Neil pleaded guilty, everything would end with this arraignment. If he pleaded not guilty, she would have to appear in court, like truly appear. _Testify_. Though Max didn’t care that much about public speaking when it was a generic topic, the idea of recounting the details of everything Neil had done to a courtroom full of people was horrifying. She didn’t know what difference it made in Neil’s position as to whether or not he pleaded guilty or not, but she was praying silently but forcefully that he would plead guilty and this would be over.

Neil’s attorney stood. Neil barely acknowledged this. The attorney looked forward at the judge and said in a very precise tone, “Mr. Hargrove enters a plea of guilty to all charges.”

Guilty.

Max gasped involuntarily, knowing her friends were looking at her, knowing _Neil_ was looking at her because she was looking at him and he was looking back. He blinked at her, frowning incessantly, the frown rejecting any possibility of the guilty plea being because he thought he was actually guilty or cared about what he had done. It didn’t matter, it made no difference whatsoever to Max.

The judge was ruffling through more papers, the quiet in the courtroom tense. He scribbled something in pencil on one of the papers, then lifted his head up, addressing Neil again. “At this time, under the guidelines of the law as written in the state of Indiana, the court sentences Mr. Neil Hargrove to one year in prison, with the potential for parole after eight months.”

Was that it? Max couldn’t pretend to know how long it was supposed to be, couldn’t even pretend to have an idea of what she thought Neil deserved. But eight months would only take them into August of next year. Did she only have until August before Neil was out in the world again? She’d thought she didn’t care very much what happened to him, believing with her mother leaving him she’d never have to interact with him again. But now, with the timeline spelled out, any amount of time seemed too soon. The relief at having him put away somewhere was going to be gone before she was even a sophomore in high school.

She shut out the remainder of the arraignment, running dates through her head, picturing Neil with an ankle bracelet, wondering how parole would even work for him without a family. She was genuinely surprised when she felt a hand on her shoulder and realized Lucas was pushing her out of the courtroom. She walked unsteady from having sat on the hard bench so long.

In the lobby of the courthouse came the celebration that Max struggled to accept. Susan hugged her tightly but she barely returned the gesture, arms hooked loosely around her mother’s back, eyes glazed over. Mike was telling El what parole was in a hushed tone, the words somehow standing out to Max among all the others being flung around by her friends. She allowed Lucas to hug her after her mother, questioning inwardly what part of the arraignment had led to this being a moment full of hugs.

As if in answer to her question, Lucas withdrew from hugging her, one arm still on hers, and said, “Max, it’s over. It’s _over_.”

She nodded, taking it in, accepting it, only not fully. It felt like something was over, but not everything. Some words had been said, Neil was gone for now. It didn’t mean life was now the way it had been before July. It didn’t mean everything that plagued her constantly, everything that kept her awake at night, was now fixed and done.

She shoved the negativity out of her head for the drive home, talking freely with El about things unrelated to Neil. It kept coming back to her how distant she felt but each time she pushed it away, not willing to let it take her over no matter how hard it tried to. They made plans to watch _The Karate Kid_ that afternoon before going over to Mike’s to hang out with the rest of the Party. It wasn’t yet three o’clock when they were back at Max’s house, Joyce having come with them to spend time with Susan. Max didn’t really know why Joyce was spending time with her mother, but she thought it was kind of nice that her mother was talking to somebody besides her or Neil.

Max and El took over the living room TV. Steve had brought the VHS of _The Karate Kid_ to the arraignment in his car, and now Max inserted it into their VCR. She joined Eleven on the couch, scooting close to her to share the bowl of popcorn she’d made.

Max had loved _The Karate Kid_ when she saw it in the cinema, but she hadn’t seen it since. She saw it in a new light now, relishing in how Daniel, the main character, got back at the people who’d bullied him.

“He’s like you,” she remarked to El towards the end of the movie, “not letting those lab people take you away. _Destroying_ them.” She held out her hand the way El had when she used her powers. She and Eleven didn’t frequently talk about El’s powers anymore because they had failed to return. But in the context of the pride Max felt for El being badass, it seemed okay to say that, and El didn’t seem at all offended, giggling at Max’s imitation of her.

“He’s like you,” El said back. “With your stepdad.”

Max sighed and shook her head. “Not really,” she objected, “I never destroyed him.”

El gestured at the TV like she wanted Max to pause the movie, which she did. “He’s gone,” she insisted. “Life _sucks_ for him now. It’s over.”

That same concept again, it being over. It just didn’t feel like it.

Max glanced back at the movie, which was now paused. Ralph Macchio’s face was frozen on the screen, holding onto the trophy he had won. An idea was forming in her mind faster than she could evaluate it to decide if it was crazy. It was crazy, but she didn’t care. For the first time in weeks, her mind was clear, unrelenting.

She stood up and marched across the room to the telephone, leaving El confused on the couch.

She punched the Wheelers’ phone number into the phone and waited for it to ring, impatient. As usual, Mrs. Wheeler answered, but agreed to call down to the boys in the basement. A moment later, Lucas was on the phone.

“Max-”

“Lucas! I just had an idea. Can you guys come over?” She was aware of how quickly she was speaking.

“I thought you and El were coming over here.” His tone did not match the excited urgency in hers.

“We are, but I’m going to do something first, and it’s going to be awesome.” She paused to catch her breath. “I figured if I didn’t invite you guys, you’d whine later about not getting to see it, like ‘Max and El always do stuff without ussss-’”

“Um, we don’t whine about you guys-”

“Just come over, it’s not that far. Are you not going to let the one whose stepdad just went to prison get her way?” She said it in the same hurried way, but inside the words stung. The darkness was seeping into her drivenness, dampening her spirits.

No. That was why she was doing this. She was getting her own revenge, the kind no court could impose on someone, the kind that would truly hurt Neil. Maybe if she did this, his face wouldn’t be stuck in her head like it was, her memories of him and Billy would stop contorting into the messes that overtook her dreams…

“Max, are you even there?”

“Right, sorry,” she said. She’d zoned out. “Are you coming?”

“I said we were. So bye. See you in like fifteen minutes.” Lucas hung up, leaving Max standing at the phone listening to the dial tone. She hung the phone up on her end and turned to El, who was now in front of Max, obviously attempting to deduce what she was doing.

“Come with me,” Max instructed El, grabbing her by the hand and leading her down the hall to the door into the garage. “You’ll find out what we’re doing when the boys get here.” El didn’t question this, watching Max with a growing expression of alarm as Max rooted through the front of the garage where various boxes from their move had been left.

El’s expression of alarm became more extreme when Max lifted a child-size baseball bat–an ancient one of Billy’s–from one of the boxes, satisfied. “Max, what are you doing?” She asked.

Max grinned knowingly. “You’ll see, seriously.”

They left the garage, returning to the living room. Max set the bat on the floor next to the couch and hit play on the movie, waiting for the boys. They had barely watched one more minute of it when she heard her mother and Joyce enter the room and spun to see them standing there meaningfully. She paused the movie.

“Max,” Joyce began, failing to conceal the smile that was creeping across her face. “Your mother has news for you.” Max shifted in her seat and looked at her mother uncertainly, but Joyce spoke again instead. “First, I want you to know that your mother and I discussed it and if something were to happen with your custody where they wanted you to leave Hawkins, I would be more than happy to have you come stay with us.”

This was good news, Max knew, but she couldn’t quite categorize it. Living with El and Will was better than going to LA. But the way Joyce had worded it was odd: _if_ something were to happen with her custody, _if_ they wanted her to leave Hawkins. It didn’t sound right, not with the limited information they currently knew about what the court was considering.

“But,” Susan said, voice softer than Joyce’s, “that was before the call we just received.”

Call? Max hadn’t heard the phone. It must have been when she and Max were in the garage. But they had only been in the garage for a few minutes. A few-minute-long phone call hardly seemed like the way the court would inform someone that their child was being removed from their custody.

“Mom, what did they say?” Max pressed, unwilling to wait even seconds longer than she had to for this news.

“They said…” Susan’s eyes were brightening, a smile was spreading across her face. “They said that for now, on a kind of probation they’ll explain later in person, that they’ve granted me custody of you. You don’t have to go to LA. You don’t have to go anywhere. You don’t have to leave Hawkins.”

Oh, _that_ kind of call lasted a few minutes. The good kind.

The kind that meant that maybe everything was going to be all right.

El was hugging Max, Max’s hands pressed over her mouth in disbelief. She felt suddenly too warm in her hoodie. _You don’t have to leave Hawkins_. She didn’t have to leave. She didn’t have to leave her mother, her friends, her entire life.

 _This_ was what it meant for something to be over. Not that it _really_ was, even now, because everything was still different from before July and there was still a sickness in her stomach that had been there for too long. But unlike Neil getting a year in prison, unlike him getting parole after eight months, this was something that made her understand why people celebrated things. She hugged El back, momentarily at peace.

Then she saw the bat on the floor where she had left it, just out of the line of vision of Susan and Joyce. No amount of good news could stifle her need for revenge. If anything, the news made her more certain of it, more eager for a release. Neil didn’t get to ruin her life from prison, but she could ruin his while he was in prison. Sort of.

“Can we finish the movie?” Max said to her mother when the celebrating had died down enough for it not to be rude. “It’s almost over.”

Susan nodded, disappearing back down the hall with Joyce. Max didn’t know for sure what they were doing, but she had a decent hunch that they were packing up all of Neil’s stuff that was still in the master bedroom. Her mother’s form of getting rid of Neil, but not good enough for Max.

According to the clock, almost fifteen minutes had passed since Max had called Lucas. She picked up the bat and said to Eleven, “Let’s wait outside for them.” El didn’t even try to object.

They went out on the porch, shutting the door very quietly. Max sat down on the steps impatiently, rolling the bat back and forth across her lap. El perched next to Max, scanning the road. Soon after they’d gone outside, all four boys came biking up the street, stopping in the street in front of Max’s house. She jumped up and went to them, El trailing behind.

Whatever they were expecting, it was not Max to be holding a Little League sized baseball bat, a steely glint in her eyes.

“What the hell?” Mike said, looking at her like she had totally lost her mind.

She rolled her eyes. “I haven’t even done anything yet.”

“Yeah, well, what are you going to do?” Lucas appeared equally scandalized. “You’re not going to, like, kill your mom, are you?”

El’s eyes widened despite this being a joke. Probably. Max found it funny how terrified everyone was of her with the bat. It made her feel powerful, which was a way she hadn’t felt in quite some time. “No, I’m not going to kill anybody,” she said pointedly. “I’m going to kill some _thing_.”

They all looked incredibly confused. Dustin was the only one who seemed to get it when she started to approach Neil’s car, parked about ten feet from where they were standing. “Holy shit,” he said breathlessly. “Max, I don’t know if you should do that.”

But no one was going to stop her. She had made up her mind. A foot from the car, she planted her feet like she was at home plate instead of in the street facing Neil’s relatively new black Chevy Impala. The rest of her friends got what was happening right about when she raised the bat.

“Max, I don’t know-”

Lucas never finished his sentence. He was cut off by the sound of glass shattering. Max had smashed the bat through the driver’s side window.

The window shattering was nothing like when Neil had thrown a plate at Max and it shattered. It was due to her own volition, big and extreme and _satisfying_. She stepped back slightly to avoid stepping on the broken glass but didn’t stop, swinging again with the bat. This time, she struck the car mirror, shattering it as well. She swung two, three, four more times, the metal of the car denting inward, the paint chipping off, the noise loud enough to draw the attention of any neighbors if they were home.

Her friends said nothing for what felt like forever, watching her destroy the car as if unable to comprehend that she was actually doing this. Max must have hit the car at least ten times with the bat before she felt a tug on it, someone pulling it away from her. Lucas.

He stared at her like she was insane, gripping the bat like she might try to snatch it back. “You’ve lost your mind!” He yelled at her. But there was something in his voice that she recognized, and it wasn’t anger: it was awe.

She hadn’t lost her mind, anyway. Staring at the car, completely wrecked in front of her, her mind was finally calm, like this was what she needed for it to be over.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end of this chapter was so damn much fun to write, hands down having Max destroy the car was the most fun thing I've ever written.
> 
> This is the second-to-last chapter, so all will be over tomorrow :(
> 
> BUT I have an extremely good idea for a sequel that I am so so excited to start writing, so all will not be over! I wasn't going to do a sequel just to do a sequel but I was struck with major inspiration and now I can't wait to write it. Anyway that's my exciting announcement yay haha.


	15. Thanksgiving

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THE END IS HERE

**November 28, 1985**

“-and then she just _smashed_ the car, like destroyed it!”

Dustin was recounting the tale of Max destroying Neil’s car to Steve. They were at Family Video, renting movies to watch that night after Thanksgiving dinner at the Wheelers.

“Let me get this straight, you literally totaled your stepdad’s car?” Max couldn’t tell if Steve sounded impressed or horrified. Likely a mix of both, which was the common reaction she’d been receiving. Only her mother had failed to hit the impressed part, furious that Max had made such a scene in front of the neighbors and such a mess to clean up (she hadn’t really been that upset about the car; because it legally belonged to Neil, they couldn’t sell it or really do anything with it, so it was all the same to her if it was destroyed).

She shrugged. “It’s not _totaled_ , it _could_ be fixed. If someone wanted to.”

Steve raised his eyebrows at her quizzically. “You sure you haven’t gone off your rocker? Are you going to start taking people out with a bat next?”

“At least my bat doesn’t have nails on it,” she retorted.

“To fight Demogorgons, not people’s cars!”

“He deserved it,” Max said, grabbing the movies off the counter before Dustin could, though he had paid for them.

Steve paused, then half nodded acceptingly. “Yeah. He did. Screw his car.”

“Screw _him_ ,” Max responded, voice strong.

The high of smashing the car had lasted until the end of the day on Tuesday. By the time Max had gone to bed, her mind had clouded back over. Something about the finality of the whole thing made her nervous. So Neil was in jail. So he wasn’t coming back. So her mother and Neil were getting a divorce. So she was staying in Hawkins. She couldn’t help but feel like there had to be a catch. There was always a catch.

Max had only known Neil for a portion of her life, but he had been in Billy’s for the entirety of Billy’s life and she knew it was naive to think everything would get better in _her_ life just because Neil was gone. He had changed Billy in an irreversible way, inflicted damage to him that had been so powerful it had released Billy from the Mind Flayer. Max fully understood how memories could be that powerful. Her own memories pulled at her every second, filling her with an ache that never left. At night, it made her afraid to sleep, but in the daylight it only frustrated her. She was frustrated with Neil for ever having existed, for continuing to exist.

Steve was looking at her funnily. She ignored this, passing the movies to Dustin, no longer wanting to carry them.

“We have to go or my mom is going to be pissed off,” Mike said. “She said if we’re not home by five o’clock she’ll slit out throats.”

“Damn, that’s kind of dark,” Lucas said.

The Party waved to Steve and left the video store. Having Will and El there made life much more complete. El climbed on the back of Mike’s bike and they started for the Wheeler house.

Lucas turned off at his own house, calling that he’d see them later. The Sinclairs had Thanksgiving as a family, but Lucas was allowed to come over after the actual meal. The rest of them stopped at the Wheeler house. Entering the house through the garage, they headed to the dining area, where the rest of their families were. The aroma of the cooking food filled the house.

There were thirteen people in total and not thirteen spots at the Wheelers’ dining room table, so Mrs. Wheeler had set up a second table to the side. She didn’t explicitly call it the kids’ table, but she didn’t have to. Max didn’t really mind, and she didn’t think her friends did, either. It was more fun to talk amongst themselves than to listen to the boringly polite conversations of the adults.

Considering that it had taken all day to cook, they ate the meal relatively quickly. Max and her friends had all been hanging out nonstop since El and Will arrived, but somehow they managed to never run out of things to talk about. The animated conversation was normal, but when Max separated herself from it she recognized how lucky she was to have a group of friends like this. Before Hawkins, she hadn’t known it was possible. That was one good thing Neil had brought into her life: Hawkins and her friends. If it weren’t for Billy, she’d still be living in California; after all, they’d moved to Hawkins because of how out of control Billy was becoming. It had not made him any less out of control, which Max had always known was impossible, but it was a fair attempt.

“Can we go to the basement now?” Mike asked his mother as they started cleaning up their plates. The adults were still chatting at the table, but they, too, had finished eating.

Mrs. Wheeler looked exasperatedly at Mike. “We’re not finished having our Thanksgiving yet.”

“We are,” Mike said, gesturing with his head to the empty “kids’" table. They all clutched plates in their hands.

“Okay, well…”

Mrs. Wheeler glanced at Joyce, who smiled sympathetically but said, “I mean, it is a holiday, Karen.”

“Okay, but put your dishes in the sink. And do _not_ drop them, they were a wedding present-”

They were already on their way to the kitchen. They left their plates in the sink and then beelined to the basement, shutting the door loudly behind them.

“I wonder if Lucas is done yet,” Will said as they all flopped down in various places across the couch and the floor.

Max turned to the clock, which read 6:21. “Probably. He said he was almost late, so they probably started eating before we did. I can go get him.” She stood up from her seat on the floor.

“We can just call him,” Mike said, but Max shrugged.

“It’s fine, I’ll go.” A short walk outside sounded nice.

None of them seemed to care, so she marched towards the side door of the basement and slipped out. It was freezing outside, a chill settling into her the second she shut the basement door. She was only wearing a sweater, having left her coat upstairs. Oh well, she’d be fine to walk next door.

The darkness of the street enveloped her when she reached it. It was so quiet out here. The quiet relaxed her, drew her thoughts inwards. She took long, steady steps towards the Sinclairs’ house, hesitating only when she reached the path to the front door. She hadn’t thought about having to personally interrupt their Thanksgiving dinner.

They seemed to have just finished, however, when Max rang the doorbell. Mrs. Sinclair swung open the door, Lucas appearing moments later.

“Max!” She exclaimed, smiling. “Lucas was just about to head over. How are you?”

She smiled back at Mrs. Sinclair, feeling slightly awkward at the question. “I’m good,” she said, unable to maintain eye contact.

“I’m glad to hear it.” Lucas pushed past his mother to join Max on the porch. Mrs. Sinclair didn’t object to the abruptness, adding, “Well, have fun tonight.”

When Mrs. Sinclair had shut the front door, Max and Lucas headed back down the path to the street. The darkness was still relaxing to Max, even with Lucas there. She looked up at the sky, black but clear. A few stars were visible, tiny sparkling beads of light among the blackness.

“It’s kind of nice out here,” Max remarked, eyes still on the sky. She’d grown numb to the cold, her cheeks flushed.

Lucas followed her gaze to the sky, halting. She did the same, both of them standing still in the middle of the street. “Yeah, it’s, like, super dark,” he said, half jokingly.

She rolled her eyes at him in the darkness. “There are stars, too, you’re just blind. Anyway, the darkness is peaceful.”

“Yeah? Are you into peace now?” He lowered his head, now looking at her.

She, too, turned away from the sky, facing him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, not much was peaceful about that baseball bat,” he answered, still sounding like he was kidding but with some truth to it. “I think ‘crazy’ is more the term for-”

“So you think I’m crazy?” Her voice was more challenging than his; she was taking this more seriously. She knew he wasn’t being serious, but she didn’t like the way he said it regardless. To her, destroying Neil’s car was like injecting Billy to stop him from killing Steve. It was an action sparked from a place of necessity. The way she’d felt before she did it…no part of her had wanted to think about if it was crazy or not. In retrospect, she knew it was a little bit crazy, but accepting that she had lost control was not something she was willing to do.

“No! Not _crazy_ , just…like…insane?” Lucas was backtracking.

She furrowed her eyebrows. “This may come as a surprise to you, but ‘insane’ is actually listed as a synonym for ‘crazy.’ Dare I say, a more intense synonym.” The sarcasm with which she spoke was not resemblant of her true feelings. Those were jumbled.

“Okay, fine, it was cool when you smashed the car. Badass.” Lucas held up his hands in surrender.

“I’m not crazy, okay?” She didn’t mean to say it in the way she did, it just came out.

Lucas hesitated. She wrapped her arms around herself, her muscles beginning to ache from the cold. She waited for him to speak.

He put his hands in his jacket pockets like he was also cold. “You don’t _really_ think you’re crazy, do you?” He asked finally. “I was just kidding. The car thing was awesome.”

She tilted her head. “I mean, you said I was crazy about twenty times, so…”

“I was kidding!” He sounded regretful. “You’re not crazy, Max, I swear. It was just a car, his car, and he’s a horrible person. He deserved it. So that’s why you did it, only because he deserved it. A crazy person does stuff to people who don’t even deserve it.”

“Like Billy, you mean,” she responded, swallowing hard. It always came back to Billy, lately more than ever.

“Well, sure, maybe…” Lucas spoke uncertainly. That was understandable; she had no idea what she’d say if she were having this conversation with herself. “But you’re not like Billy…”

“Billy wasn’t crazy.” She said it confidently and meant it. Billy was not crazy. Out of control, most definitely. But not truly insane, not without remorse, not like Neil. Hell, at this point she wasn’t sure what “crazy” even meant. Maybe Billy _was_ crazy, but not enough to warrant her saying it about him. He was gone.

“Okay, he wasn’t crazy,” Lucas said softly.

She knew she was being frustrating and confusing. She sighed. “He was pretty crazy when he almost ran over you guys with his car last year,” she admitted. “And when he almost killed Steve.”

Lucas stepped closer to her. He seemed to be at a loss for words.

“But he wasn’t always like that,” she continued, eyes focused forward but not really seeing Lucas nor the dark street. “I mean, at some point he was normal. Eleven told me that, too.”

Max didn’t have to come right out and say what was on her mind because Lucas plainly got it. “Max, you’re nothing like Billy,” he said, quietly but firmly.

“ _Billy_ wasn’t always like Billy.” She hadn’t meant to discuss this with Lucas, didn’t know how to. He hadn’t known Billy as well as she had, didn’t know what it felt like for him to be gone but yet not really. This was something that would probably plague her until the end of time, and Lucas wasn’t going to be able to fix that.

 _“You’re never going to be like him.”_ Lucas touched her arm. She stared at him, conflicted. It was simpler to believe it, to accept that whoever she was or was not going to be like, obsessing over it wouldn’t change who she was. Simple wasn’t easy, wasn’t a permanent solution, but she was cold and she wanted to have a good time tonight.

“Maybe,” she relented. “We should go, they’re going to wonder if we died out here.”

Lucas nodded, taking her hand lightly as they started walking again. She held onto it.

When they got back to the Wheelers’ basement, their friends were waiting with a movie already displayed on the TV, the VCR paused. Max and Lucas dropped down onto the floor.

“You guys took forever,” Dustin complained, “were you making out or something?”

“Gross, creep!” Max seized a pillow from the couch and threw it at him. Eleven laughed at this and Max laughed at El laughing.

“You’re the ones who took like thirty minutes to walk twenty feet,” Mike argued.

Max snorted. “Excuse me, it’s been about ten, and you and Eleven are the ones who are always making-”

“ _Okay_ , whatever!” Mike picked up the remote and hit play on the movie. Max and El glanced at each other, shaking with silent giggles, but then directed their attention to the screen. They were watching _Gremlins_ , which had recently come out on VHS. Dustin, who was in love with Phoebe Cates, was the most excited about it.

An hour and forty-five minutes later, the credits rolled onto the screen and Mike ejected the movie from the VCR.

“That movie was disturbing,” Max said, stretching her legs out on the carpet. “Remind me why we decided to watch that.”

“It wasn’t disturbing, it was good!” Dustin objected.

“You only think so because of Phoebe Cates,” Will pointed out, thinking along the same lines as Max.

“I have a girlfriend, I merely _appreciate_ that she is a beautiful pers-”

“Let’s do something else,” Mike interrupted, powering off the TV. “Let’s go outside.”

“It’s kind of freezing out there,” Lucas said. It had taken Max’s hands twenty minutes to defrost, so she agreed with Lucas.

“We’ll wear coats.” Mike got up off the couch. Max had to admit that going outside in the dark with her friends sounded sort of fun. More reckless than things they typically did all together, though realistically not reckless at all. She got up, too, and the rest of the Party followed with various levels of accordance.

Their coats were all upstairs, and there was no way their parents would understand why they wanted to go outside after eight o’clock for no particular reason. Lucas was bullied into being the one to go get the coats, complaining about it but eventually tiptoeing up the basement stairs and through the door. They waited impatiently for him, and barely a minute later he reappeared with a grin on his face, arms full of coats. He came back down the stairs and threw them on the couch, each of them digging through the mess to locate their own coat.

When their coats were on and they were rapidly overheating in the warm basement, they hurried out the side door, shutting it carefully. Max pushed ahead of the others, again entranced by the calmness of the night. Even with her friends bickering behind her, being out here changed her mood slightly.

“Where are we even going to go?” Lucas was questioning Mike behind her.

She spun around, inspired. “I know,” she said loudly, causing them all to look up at where she was, six feet away. “Power lines.”

Mike was plainly confused about how she even knew about the power lines, considering they had never met there she was friends with them. She didn’t bother telling him that El had told her about it, because that seemed self-explanatory. The rest of the Party didn’t even appear to think about why she’d thought of the power lines, walking along behind her as she led the way. Having been to the power lines a few weeks ago, her feet found their way more easily on the hill, increasing the distance between her and her friends.

When she got to the top of the hill, she waited for them, watching them stumble around and swear. Part of her wished she had not gone ahead, and had instead stuck with them. Though she had been leading them, it was kind of lonely to watch them make their way up the hill to her.

Lucas, who had also been here recently, reached the top first, or second after Max. He dropped down into a sitting position against the fence and she sat down, too.

“Better circumstances than the last time we were here,” he whispered.

She smiled. “Just a little.”

They didn’t say anything more about it, the others sitting down next to them, forming a circle. It was silent for a minute, then Max leaned backwards, raising her arm to point up at the sky. “Look at the stars,” she said, breaking the silence. “Lucas couldn’t see them, but they’re there if you have eyes.”

Her friends obliged, all lifting their heads to scan the sky. To Max’s left, El said, “There are a lot.”

“They’re easier to see up here,” Lucas protested defensively. It was true; the patch of sky above the power lines was clearer, making the stars more prominent.

“Stars are cool, but are you guys really saying they’re more interesting than _Gremlins_?” Dustin said. He was the furthest from where Max was sitting, directly across from her.

“Yes,” Max stated dryly, nobody contesting this.

They all went silent again, lying on their backs on the grass in their lopsided circle.

Max’s mind was whirring, thoughts dwelling on how weird it was that it was just over two weeks ago when she’d sat up here with Lucas, convinced she was going to be forced to leave Hawkins with Neil. Back then, she’d been so scared, but had refused to permit herself to feel that way. Fear was always an obstacle when it came to Neil. The answer was always awful, but _clear_. All she had to do was try not to anger Neil, get away from the house whenever she could, and pretend that a large portion of her life didn’t exist. She’d gotten so good at pretending it didn’t exist that when she was with her friends, it didn’t. She’d had a mission every second of the day, a reason to sigh with relief every night when she went to sleep. She’d been miserable, but she had known how to lead that miserable life.

Looking up at the stars between the power lines above her, she didn’t know what life she was supposed to be leading anymore. Before the fourth of July, she’d lived one way. After it, she’d lived another way. But now, _after_ the after, she required a third way to live that she hadn’t yet figured out. The only time since Neil’s arrest that she had felt back in control of her own life was when she had held the baseball bat, smashing Neil’s car until it was no longer drivable. And _that_ , that was something that Billy would do. That was how Billy dealt with things.

That was what scared her.

“It’s Thanksgiving,” Will was saying. The rest of Max’s friends had sat up. She quickly pulled her back off the ground, her focus leaving the sky. “We should go around and, I don’t know, say what we’re thankful for.”

“Didn’t we do that in kindergarten?” Mike said, clearly not too interested in the idea.

But Will persisted. “Come on,” he pleaded. “I’ll start: I’m thankful that El and I could come back here for Thanksgiving.”

Will turned to Mike, who was next to him, indicating that it was his turn. Mike groaned, but then said honestly, “I’m thankful that you and El could come, too.”

“No, you have to say something different,” Dustin piped up. “You can’t say the same thing Will said.”

It was too dark to see the expression on Mike’s face, but it was probably something like annoyance. “Fine…I’m thankful to have all of you guys as my friends.”

El was in between Mike and Max. She was holding hands with Mike, but looked at Max as she said, “I’m thankful Max’s stepdad is gone.”

Gone. El always used that word to refer to dead people, which Neil certainly was not. Max was genuinely uncertain if she’d describe Neil as gone in any sense of the word, but the fact that El chose this of all things to be thankful was nice. Her heart filled with love for Eleven.

Her turn, Max rested her hands on her knees, sitting criss-cross-applesauce. “Not trying to steal from Mike, but I’m thankful that all of you are my friends, too.”

She didn’t know what else could perfectly capture what she was genuinely thankful for. She was thankful Neil was gone, thankful she had her mother, but there was too much _other_ stuff involved in those things. She didn’t want to mention Neil, anyway. Nothing to do with him was what she was most thankful for. Years from now, hopefully he would truly be gone, not like he was now but for real. Gone from her life, gone from her head. Her friends, though, would never be gone.

That was what she was thankful for. She was thankful for everything they had done for her, for them originally taking her into the Party at all. She was thankful that even though she might be losing her mind, she didn’t think they’d disappear if she did (probably; Billy never really had friends, but according to Lucas she was not Billy and she was still choosing to believe him).

None of them told her she had to think of something else to say, not even Mike. They understood.

Max noticed that Lucas was shredding grass into his lap, her habit. “I’m thankful it’s almost Christmas,” he said.

“And I’m thankful Steve gives me the employee discount,” Dustin said, finishing the circle of thankfulness. Oh yeah, that was why Dustin always paid. Only now did Max remember.

They were all looking at Will, having come back around the circle to him. “Happy Thanksgiving, guys,” he said, smiling at them.

They echoed it back to him. Though it was lighthearted and not serious, Max could tell they all meant it. She leaned back again, affixing her gaze upwards. The power lines felt close compared to the vastness of the sky.

“We should probably go back.” Mike sounded disappointed to have to say it. “They’re going to kill us if they find out we snuck out even to come up here.”

“One more minute,” Max pushed. She wanted one more minute of this moment, to burn it into her memory.

If she could really have her way, it would last forever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I cannot believe this story is over, oh my god. I started it just over two weeks ago but I can't even remember quarantine without it (and I can barely remember life before quarantine so...). I had no idea it was going to become what it did but despite all the frustration and stress I've gone through I'm really happy with the outcome.
> 
> THANK YOU SO MUCH to every single person that has read this, regardless of if you commented/subscribed etc. It motivated me a lot to know that even a few people were interested in reading more. A second thank you to everyone who did review, all of your comments made me so happy to read every day (special thank you to lucdarling and Jenna, your lovely comments on every single chapter never failed brightened my day ahh)!!
> 
> As far as a sequel, I didn't want to be repetitive at all with one. I wanted to do something that didn't copy the plotline of this story but had a similar vibe and now I am so looking forward to starting it. I feel like I kind of foreshadowed the plot with this chapter haha. If you're interested in reading that, I should be posting the first chapter tomorrow! ♡
> 
> PSA IF YOU ARE READING THIS NOW THE SEQUEL IS OUT!


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